Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  Of course.

  “They listen to you, don’t they?” I said. “Your people in the village.”

  He looked away, and I caught something I rarely saw in his face. It was not deception, exactly, but there was a reluctance to speak, and when he just shrugged, I asked him directly.

  “Who are you really, Mnenga? I know you are a herder with your brothers, but there is something more, isn’t there? Something you haven’t told me.”

  “Nothing important,” he said.

  “That’s not a no.”

  He sighed in resignation.

  “My people—the Unassimilated Tribes—have different ways of choosing their leaders. In my village, the oldest men and women give jobs to the younger people according to their talents. I am the Outward Face of the village. I travel. I talk to people from other places. Even the city. One day I will be on the tribal council. I did not choose this,” he said, and his tone suggested he would not have done. “But it is my job, and I must do it. As well as looking after the nbezu,” he added, finding his smile once more.

  I nodded. I thought of his facility with Feldish, his composure under pressure, and his knowledge of the political world. That he should have been earmarked as a kind of ambassador, possibly even a future leader for his people, made sense to me, perhaps more sense than it made to him.

  “I don’t know what will happen to the refugees,” I said, “the Quundu, and I know they can’t stay here forever, but if your brothers can spare you—”

  “Spare me?” he said, puzzled.

  “If they can work without you, I’d like you to stay with them for as long as you can. They like you.”

  He shrugged and smiled at that, as if it was a great mystery he had come to accept.

  “And you?” he asked. “You like me too?”

  “Always,” I said. “You know that.”

  He considered me and smiled shyly. It wasn’t quite the liking he wanted, perhaps, said the smile, but he would take it. Then his face darkened.

  “The girl,” he said. “Ife. The one with the burns. She was working in a factory near the docks. They worked only at night. It caught fire. Her mother did not survive.”

  It was as if I had been experimenting with Namud’s lock picks, twisting, rotating each one in turn, fingers focused but mind wandering, till the snap of one of the lock’s tumblers seized my attention and held it.

  * * *

  I HAD LESS THAN an hour of darkness left to me by the time I had made my way into the city and crossed into the docklands of Dagenham Steps. There were no streetlamps in the back alleys, and the darkness was thick and dangerous between the tenements and factories. The area smelled of urine and machine oil, coal smoke, and the sour edge of the river where pools stagnated, dammed up and glistening with industrial filth. The air was thick with the peculiar tang of the smoke from the pottery kilns whose swollen, bottleneck chimneys stood like a huddle of fat, blank-faced men. Horritch’s factory—which is to say Horritch’s remaining factory—where Sureyna and I had met Bertha, was so dark that for a moment I thought I had been wrong. The windows showed no signs of life, the doors were locked, and the sky was still too gloomy to see if there was smoke coming out. I moved cautiously, watching for guards, skulking from coal hutch to the deep shade of a container car with roughly cut vents near the top and marked with a large yellow M, seemingly abandoned on a nearby siding. Two night watchmen were on duty, one covering the door through which I had last entered the building, one patrolling the perimeter. I had almost decided that getting closer was not worth the risk when I heard the distinct whine of machinery followed by a hiss as steam burst from a vent on the second story.

  The elevator.

  Someone was working inside on the “off-limits” upper floor. I scoured the building for signs of a ladder to the roof, but if there had ever been one, it had been removed. I knew that the interior stairwell was carefully locked, so the only way up was by the steam elevator, or at least up the shaft through which it ran.

  The patrolling guard was lazy, predictable. After I had watched his circuit a couple of times, languid, whistling the same music hall tune in incompetent snatches, I knew how to time my approach. I remembered the stifling heat of the warehouse and knew there would be ventilators communicating with the outside. Some would be on the roof, but others were visible in the walls. They would be tight, and I may need to force a grating or two, but they would be no worse than climbing the inside of a chimney.

  As the watchman rounded the corner, heading toward the river, I sprinted from my vantage and scaled the bars on the outside of one of the great oval-topped windows. From there I was able to reach over to the downturned pipe that emerged from the brick like a great faucet. Its internal diameter was about two feet and, for the first time in a while, I wished I was a couple of years younger.

  I swung across, thrust my left arm up the pipe till I could hook it over the bend, then let go of the window bars and flung my right hand up there as well. For a second or two I just hung, before I worked my aching shoulders in, drawing my weight through and over. My satchel snagged on the pipe, but I wriggled, shrugging off the claustrophobia and fighting my way in till only my legs stuck out. As I paused for breath, I heard the distinct sound of whistling.

  The guard was coming back.

  It was too much to hope that he wouldn’t see me dangling a few feet above his head. I squirmed and fought like a snagged fish on a line, pulling, tightening my belly, rolling joints and muscles against the hard seams of the metal. The whistling got louder as the guard rounded the corner so I drew my legs up at the knee to try and get my feet out of sight.

  Somehow that was the one wriggle I hadn’t tried, and I slid over the bend in the pipe and fell headfirst into an iron box fitted to the inside wall of the silent factory. I kept very still and counted to fifty.The whistling never stopped, and as it faded away, I focused my attention on the wire mesh fastened across the front of the box.

  The wire was no match for the bolt cutters in my satchel, and in under a minute, I had snipped enough that I could brace the soles of my boots against it and push till it opened like a hatch. I slipped through, hung from my fingers, then dropped, bending my knees and rolling out the impact of the hard concrete floor.

  I scuttled into the shade of one of the great crablike looms, listening, but there was no sound of anyone there, though I could feel a steady hum reverberating through the empty air. It was coming from above. The massive structure of iron beams, concrete, and brick insulated the sound well, but there was no doubt. Someone was running machinery up there. A lot of it.

  The elevator had gone up, but the gate at the bottom was open, revealing the shaft and the cables that linked the elevator platform to the throbbing engine beside it. I put my hand to the boiler and felt its heat. Whoever operated it had gone up on the platform, but he wouldn’t leave it unattended for any length of time, and I wouldn’t be able to get up there, even if I could scale the inside of the shaft, so long as the elevator was locked in place on the upper floor. I was going to have to wait for it to come down.

  I looked around for somewhere to hide, and in that moment, the engine gasped, the great steel wheel began to turn, and as the cable rolled out, the platform began to slide down the shaft.

  I ducked hurriedly behind a pallet of bundled fabric and dropped into a crouch, hands on the bales of cloth.

  The fabric was unusually soft.

  I kneaded it with my fingers in the dark as I listened to the descent of the elevator, felt its extraordinary smoothness and elasticity, and even in the low light, I thought I caught a slight sheen, an inner glow like what I had seen on Agatha Markeson’s shawl.

  Bar-Selehm silk.

  The steam elevator thunked into place, and someone grunted, dragging another bale of cloth for the pile. As I knelt breathless behind the stack, he heaved it into place and then sauntered off along the long aisle of the factory, wheezing from the exertion.

  This was my chance
.

  I got to my feet and slid round the heaped fabric and onto the elevator platform. The inside of the shaft was a girdered cage, the cables that bore the elevator running up to a great pulley system high in the tower. I jumped, grasped the bar over my head and swung my boots onto the girders in the wall. Gripping the cable above me with both hands, I began to walk my way slowly and silently up the shaft.

  The gate at the top was latched but not locked, and in seconds, I was on another concrete floor, behind another door with a glass pane in it through which I saw the illegal night shift finishing their work.

  Women and children, all black, mostly wearing the same inadequate and ragged robes I knew from the kids who had been taken in at the Drowning, the same thin arms and legs, the same tired, desperate eyes. Dozens of them. Fifty at least, judging by the arrangement of the machines, some as young as six or seven.

  The upper story was half machines—smaller than those in the shed below, finer somehow—and half pallets of bedding and boxes containing the workers’ bits of things. It was no wonder they looked so weak and sickly. They probably hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks. I cracked the door a fraction and was hit by heat and by the stench of machines and bodies intertwined, fused till one became the other.

  Now I was here, now that I had seen them and understood the horror of their endless prison, I found that I did not know what to do. My instinct was to kick the door wide, pistol in hand, and urge them out in a great riot of liberation that would sweep the guards under our feet. Even as I wondered how to get them down by the elevator or break through to the staircase, I knew that getting them out of the building was only solving the beginning of the problem. I could not get them to the Drowning from here unseen, particularly now that the morning shift was about to begin and the streets would be packed with workers. Trying to do so would only lead to their arrest, after which they would be packed onto ships and sent back to war and devastation.

  Suddenly it seemed that all I could offer was a choice of miseries, different places in which to live in exploitation and die in poverty. What had Rahvey said?

  Life, eh, sister mine? It’s no place to be poor.

  I stood there, paralyzed by indecision, like one of the shuttles waiting to be sent one way, then the other, endlessly hurried back and forth, my movement under someone else’s control. One by one, the looms were shutting down, and I realized, too late, that the foremen would be coming to inspect the work.

  The elevator whirred into life, and the cables started to run as a snatch of speech drifted up to me.

  “… package it all up and crate it for Georgie May by midnight.”

  Horrified, I looked down and saw the bowler hats of three men, two in shirtsleeves, one in a jacket. They were coming up.

  I pushed through the door, pulling the scarf over my mouth and nose to cut the stench as much as to hide my face. One of the women who was standing up with weary relief as her loom shut down, spotted me, and gave me a long baffled look. The room was lit with the soft amber light of oil lamps, which hung over the looms, and the walls were so dark you could barely make out the shuttered windows. I moved toward them, fishing in my satchel for a crowbar, conscious of the elevator’s steady, squeaking ascent up the shaft, and then came a voice, loud and accusatory, shouting in Feldish.

  “You! Stop where you are.”

  He was burly and black, but one look at the heavy stick in his hands said I should expect no help there.

  “Stop,” he roared again, “or I swear I’ll beat you to death right here!”

  He had an accent, and not of the city. One of the smugglers, perhaps, who had brought the people here and had been paid to stay on to badger them in their own tongue. I didn’t doubt that he meant what he said.

  I moved quickly to the nearest window, but realized too late I would not get the shutter open before he caught up to me. I worked one bolt free, but had barely got the crowbar under the padlock when I saw him appear around one of the looms, head lowered and bullish. He wore sea boots, and his face was scarred on both cheeks, as if branded. The stick in his hands looked iron-hard, and he tapped it meaningfully in one large open palm, grinning like a jackal.

  I wasn’t sure where the cry started. It was one of the women. I didn’t see who was the first to move. Suddenly there was a throng around him, thin arms and hollow cheeks, pushing and shouting words I did not understand, their anger unmistakable. One of them looked at me and urged me with a cry and a gesture. They could not delay him for more than a few seconds. Already he was fighting free of their slashing nails, laying about him with his club.

  Horrified, I wrenched at the lock, and it popped open. The shutter juddered and swung, and I used the crowbar to smash the glass in one of the panes behind it. It was a long way down, and there was no ladder.

  I shot one agonized glance back into the shed. The man with the stick was shrugging the women off, but he looked angry, even as the three white men came hurrying over to him from the steam elevator. I leaned back against the window, reached through the frame with both hands and hoisted myself through. There was no way down, but the inset patterning of the brick was as good as a ladder up to the roof. Using only fingers and toes, I scrambled up the fifteen feet or so to the top and hauled myself over the gutter.

  The roof was pitched steeply, like an engine shed, but there was a walkway along the side, and I moved quickly, one hand on the slates, hoping that my memory was right. At the back of the factory where the warm chimney pointed into the sky like a gun, still smoking in the first light of day, was an access platform and, across a narrow ginnel between the buildings, a work shed connected to the pottery yards with a flat roof, only ten feet below.

  I did not break stride. Running full pelt, I vaulted through the air, rolling on the roof next door, the satchel clutched to my chest. I landed among the uncanny brick landscape of the bottleneck kilns and paused to look back, to see if any of Horritch’s men had dared to give chase, or if they were going down by the stairs in the hope of catching me at the bottom. If so, they would be disappointed. I had a clear route over the pottery works, shielded by its hot, bulbous chimneys, the blast furnace on Wharf Street, and the tanner’s yard shed, and could drop to street level at any point.

  But my flash of confidence and triumph lasted only a second, and not because they were coming after me. The black man who looked like a pirate was leaning out of the window, looking wildly around, but they had lost me as I went over the roof, and I had a good lead on them now. No, it wasn’t them who made my breath catch.

  Perching on the top of the chimney forty feet above me was an outlandish figure wrapped in torn fabric. It was crouching froglike, a pale, gangly creature, hairless and strangely gray so that it looked barely human.

  The Gargoyle.

  CHAPTER

  29

  THE THING I HAD thought was the Gargoyle—the person, my rational mind insisted—watched me for a moment, then vanished round the far side of the chimney. I blinked, feeling the strangeness of a tremor in my reality, but I did not wait to see if it reappeared.

  I also did not go straight into the city. Instead, I went down to the river and made my way through the tangle of back streets till I reached the remains of Nathan Horritch’s burned factory, thinking of the one I had just left where low-grade oil lamps hung perilously over the exhausted laborers. It wasn’t hard to find the place. The buildings on either side were scorched and sooty, and one—a ceramics factory with a particularly large and irregular kiln chimney—had lost part of its roof in the blaze, but of Horritch’s place there was barely anything: blackened and twisted steel beams, heat-fractured brick, and shattered roofing slates, all blue-black from the fire.

  I glanced around, but I was sure I had not been followed, either by Horritch’s thugs or by the strange figure I had glimpsed on the chimney, something I had almost managed to convince myself had been a large vervet or baboon …

  Almost.

  I squeezed through the wooden barrier
s that had been erected by the fire department and picked my way through the wreckage to where a pair of yellow steam tractors with great bulldozer blades fitted to the front sat ready to push the remains into the river. Each was marked with a stenciled letter M. Their drivers had not yet arrived, and it occurred to me that this might be the last look anyone got at the ruined site. I wandered cautiously about, my boots kicking up clouds of white ash with each step. In places glass had pooled and solidified in swirls of black and bubbling color. It had been a hot fire.

  There was metal too, far too much of it to have been part of the building’s structure. This was machinery. If the factory had been abandoned, as Horritch had claimed, there had been a lot of valuable equipment left sitting in it. I stooped to the ash and sifted it with my hand, wondering what that action reminded me of, scattering flakes of blackened brick, twisted screws and bolts, and something charred that looked like …

  Bone.

  A jawbone, human, set with broken teeth.

  The dream—the one about the flooded rice festival—came back to me in a flash, that final moment when the island beneath my feet had turned to human skulls.…

  I dropped the bone fragment in horror, then picked it up again and stared at it, turning it over in my hands and trying to tell myself that it was not what it appeared to be.

  But it was, and with the rush of exhilaration—that what I had found, what there would surely be more of, was evidence, proof of a terrible crime and its subsequent cover-up—came a deep and penetrating sense of failure and grief. I slipped the fragment into my satchel, wiped my eyes with a dusty hand, and set off for Willinghouse and the police.

  * * *

  I CROSSED THE RIVER on the Ridleford pontoon bridge and hailed a ride from a skeptical cabbie who wouldn’t let me in till I showed him the coins in my purse. If I was quick, I thought, I might catch Willinghouse at home before he left for Parliament, but even so, I took no chances, and as Namud answered the door, I stepped inside and barked out my order without pausing for breath.