“Who would steal the Beacon?” I asked. “What would be the point? You couldn’t sell it.”
Tanish shrugged again. “Maybe it was the Grappoli,” he said. Everything in Bar-Selehm could be blamed on the Grappoli, our neighbors to the northwest. “I’ll go with you.”
“Don’t you have to get to work?”
“I’m supposed to be cleaning Captain Franzen,” he said. “Supplies won’t be here till lunchtime.”
Captain Franzen was a glorified Feldish pirate who had driven off the dreaded Grappoli three hundred years ago. His statue stood atop a ceremonial pillar overlooking the old Mahweni docks.
“You can come,” I said, “but not into the birthing room, so you won’t see my sister perform her maternity.”
He gave me a quizzical look.
“The stage missed a great talent when my sister opted to stay home and have babies,” I said, grinning at him.
He brightened immediately and fell into step beside me, but a few strides later stopped suddenly. “Forgot my stuff,” he said. “Wait for me.”
I clicked my tongue irritably—Rahvey would complain about how late I was even if I ran all the way—and stood in the street, registering again the void where the glow of the Beacon should be. It was like something was missing from the air itself. I shuddered and turned back to the factory wall.
“Come on, Tanish!” I called.
The boy was standing beneath the great chimney, motionless. In fact, he wasn’t so much standing as stooping, frozen in the act of picking up his little duffel of tools. He was staring fixedly down the narrow alley that ran along the wall below the chimney stack. I called his name again, but he didn’t respond, and something in his uncanny stillness touched an alarm in my head. I began moving toward him, my pace quickening with each step till I was close enough to seize him by his little shoulders and demand to know what was keeping him.
But by then I could see it. Tanish turned suddenly into my belly, clinging to me, his eyes squeezed shut, his face bloodless. Over his shoulder I saw the body in the alley, knowing—even from this distance—that Berrit, the boy I had been waiting for, had not missed our meeting after all.
CHAPTER
2
BERRIT WAS LANI, LIKE Tanish and me. He had been, maybe, ten. I had met him once over our communal meal at the Seventh Street weavers’ shed two nights ago, when Morlak thrust him in front of me, barked his name, and told me he would be shadowing me for a few days. I had just grunted, nodding at the boy, who looked subdued and frightened. I had meant to take him aside later on, introduce myself properly—without Morlak standing over us, ready with his clumsy jokes designed to embarrass me—but I never did. Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, he had slunk away to sleep, unnoticed. It was a smart and useful skill to have on Seventh Street, inconspicuousness, and I privately commended him for it, but since I was summoned to Rahvey’s bedside the following day, I hadn’t set eyes on the boy again until I saw his broken body huddled by the factory wall.
Tanish was distraught. He had spent more time with the new boy and had never seen the result of a long fall before. I sent him to get help, and he fled, eyes streaming. Driven by an inexplicable sense of failure, of guilt, I forced myself to look.
I had seen death before. For someone of my age and background, living in the highest and—figuratively speaking—lowest places of Bar-Selehm, it was impossible not to. That does not mean that I was immune to the horror of death, and if you do not know what a fall from a great height does to a human body, thank whatever god you believe in and hope you never find out. I will not be the one to show you.
He looked so very small. Under the horror of how he had died I felt the stirrings of something deeper and more awful: something like grief, which drained my soul and brought to my eyes the tears that I had not allowed myself to shed in front of Tanish. He needed me to be strong, and I had been, but now I was alone and might crack open the door to my feelings. I felt pressure from the other side, like deep water held in check by a dam, and I squeezed the door shut once more.
I took refuge in thought, in reason, which kept feelings at bay. The drop from the chimney was sheer. There was nothing on which the boy might have cut himself before hitting the cobbled ground, so the sharp, precise incision, no more than an inch across and located directly over his spine, was strange. It would need to be cleaned and studied by people who knew what such things meant, but it raised a possibility.
The fall did not kill him.
The idea came before I could dodge it and hung in my head like the absent Beacon, blazing.
Around his neck he wore a copper pendant on a thong, a pretty thing with a sun rendered in gold enamel on a cobalt blue disk. I removed it carefully and pocketed it. There would be someone who had loved him. They should get it.
* * *
“YOU FOUND HIM?” ASKED the uniformed policeman who attended the ambulance orderlies. He was tall, white, with an overly tended mustache that was barely the right side of comic. He spoke to me in Feldish, which I spoke fluently, albeit with a Lani inflection. If you worked in Bar-Selehm, you had to, even the Lani, when we left our own communities. It was the language of the whites, and as such, it had become the language of government, of finance, trade, law, and all things that mattered. Lani like Rahvey’s husband, Sinchon, who knew only a few words of it, were virtually unemployable beyond the Drowning. I spoke it and, thanks to Vestris, even read it.
I’m not an eloquent person. I read a lot, but I spend my days up with the roosting flying foxes and the silver-winged night crows, who aren’t great conversationalists. At night I’m surrounded by adolescent boys, who are worse. I love words, but mostly they stay in my head, especially in the presence of authority.
“I was with the boy who found him, yes,” I said.
“His name is Berrit?”
“Yes.”
“Last name?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s a steeplejack?”
“Apprentice. This was his first day.”
“And he was going to work with you?”
“Yes.”
“And you are?”
“Anglet Sutonga. I work for Morlak.” I frowned, and he gave me a hard look.
“What?” he demanded.
“Nothing, sir,” I said.
“You were thinking something,” he pressed. “What? I won’t ask again.”
“Just…” I faltered. “I wondered why you weren’t writing this down.”
“Got a good memory, me,” said the policeman, gazing off down the alley. “And the city has other things to think about today. Get it all up, lads!” he called to the ambulance men. “There’s a tap on the wall. Hose off the street when you’re done.”
A vulture had settled in the alley and was watching us, waiting. I shouted at it, and it flapped a few paces away, bobbing its bald head.
“Pictures,” I blurted out.
“What?” said the policeman again.
“Photographs,” I said, eyes down, abashed. “You’ve started taking pictures at crime scenes. I saw them in the paper.”
“So?”
“They haven’t taken any,” I said, risking a look into his face.
“Crime scenes,” he echoed, as if I were unusually stupid. “This was an accident.”
“But…” I hesitated.
“But what?”
I took a breath. “The body. There’s a knife wound on the back.”
“Expert, are you?” said the policeman, giving me a sour look this time. “Steeplejack and detective, eh? Impressive. I thought girls like you had other ways of making your money.” He smirked, then gazed off down the street again. His eyes were straying to where the Beacon should have been, but wasn’t. For all his casualness, he looked troubled.
And that, I thought, was that. There would be no investigation, no real questions asked, not for a Lani street brat, particularly on a day when the city’s most recognizable landmark had vanished. I put my hand in
my pocket and was surprised to find the copper pendant on its leather thong. I took it out. It was a small thing, and for all the care of the workmanship, it was close to worthless.
The thought sent a shard of pain through my chest, and I had to pause and breathe again before squeezing my eyes—
and the dam
—shut, and I pocketed it once more.
Tanish was waiting for me, sitting in the shade, his knees drawn up tight to his skinny chest. He got to his feet as he saw me push through the huddle of gawkers craning for a glimpse of blood. I elbowed aside a man in fancy shoes and a linen suit, who turned abruptly and walked away. Even in my haste to get to Tanish, I noted the speed with which the man left, the focus, the economy of motion, and found myself wondering how long he had been watching and why.
I didn’t have the heart to tell Tanish to go home. Sarn had come, he said. Tanish had given him our tools. He would come back soon with Morlak. I didn’t want to be around then, so I set off for my sister’s house, Tanish trailing silently at my heels like a lost dog.
Everyone was rattled by the absence of the Beacon. You could see them gazing at the spire on top of the Trade Exchange, and there was a more than usually frantic crowd at the newspaper stand on Winckley Street. I scanned the headlines, which brayed the obvious: that the Beacon was gone. Beyond that, the papers knew nothing, and the report was more hysteria than news.
“You gonna buy that?” demanded the street vendor, a black girl with her hair pulled back so tight that her forehead looked strained.
“With what?” I asked with a hollow smile. The girl glared unsympathetically, and I let go of the paper, backing away from the throng and moving around the corner and into Vine Street.
“My mother taught me to read,” said Tanish. It was just something to say, I think, but once he got it out, it sounded forlorn.
“My sister taught me,” I answered, trying to sound cheerful. “Not Rahvey. Vestris.”
“How come I’ve never seen her?”
“She’s too fancy for the likes of you,” I said, unable to suppress a genuine smile now.
“Fancy?”
“Glamorous,” I said. “Rich.”
“I’d like to see her one day,” said Tanish. He had heard me talk of Vestris before and had caught a little of my reverence for her. “What does she do?”
“Do?”
“For, you know, a job?” he asked. “I mean, why is she so rich if she grew up like you?”
“Oh, she’s just sort of special,” I said airily. “She’s not rich because of where she works.”
“Why, then?”
I laughed, waving the question away. “She’s just different from the rest of us,” I concluded.
“Special,” he said, uncertain.
“Exactly.”
And I felt what I always felt when I thought of Vestris: a kind of vague privilege that I knew her. It was like sitting in a shaft of sunlight on a cool day, a private warming glow that made me the envy of everyone around me.
“One time when we were little,” I said, “the mine where Papa worked had been closed, and he had no work, which meant we had no money. Vestris brought food home every night. Rahvey asked her how she was paying for it, and you know what she said?”
“What?”
“She said, ‘I just ask nicely. I explain that my sisters are hungry, and people give me food.’”
“So she was begging.”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t like that. She’s just the kind of person people want to please. I can’t explain it.”
Tanish looked at me for more, but I said nothing.
The city was walled, and though urban sprawl had long since outgrown the old fortifications, the walls still marked the limits of Bar-Selehm proper and they were routinely patrolled. It was clear as we approached the West Gate, however, that something different was going on this morning. One of the ancient iron-bound doors had actually been closed—the first time since the city had quarantined itself during a cattle death outbreak three years ago—and people were being funneled through a gamut of dragoons. The soldiers wore their scarlet jackets and feathered helmets in spite of the mounting heat, and they carried rifles with sword bayonets. Two were mounted on striped orleks—local, zebralike horses—which stamped and tossed their heads restlessly. The troops on the ground were white, but there were members of one of the black regiments up on the walls.
This too was about the Beacon. Not Berrit.
The soldiers checked papers, but the only people they detained were those carrying bags, baskets, or crates. Me and Tanish they practically ignored, though I flinched away when one of the orleks stooped toward me, its nostrils flaring. I’m a city girl, and am not good around large animals. Once through the checkpoint, I increased my pace till Tanish was almost running to keep up.
The residential streets of the Drowning had no official names and did not appear on any map, rather coming and going from season to season as the river dwindled and flooded, shifting its course and turning what had been a bustling tent city to marshland. There were no sewer lines but the river in the Drowning. The street corners sprouted ragged produce stands, huddles of itinerant laborers hoping to be hired for a few hours, and makeshift barbecues fashioned from scrap metal and fueled by homemade charcoal. This was where I had grown up. The hut in which I was born had long since turned to firewood, and no one could remember exactly where it had stood, but this was, I supposed, home.
Once. When Papa was still alive.
The Drowning smelled different from the industrial heart of the city where I lived now, a sour smell of bodies and animals and rotting vegetables. I preferred the bitter tang of the chimneys, even if it left me hacking till my throat burned, and coated my face and arms with soot. The Drowning stank of poverty, ignorance, and despair.
I hated it.
The Lani aren’t indigenous to the region. We were brought here almost three hundred years ago from lands to the east by the whites from the north. My ancestors came as indentured servants, manual laborers and field hands, living separate from both the indigenous Mahweni and the whites. They were never slaves and believed they had settled in Feldesland by choice, keeping to themselves as the northerners conquered, bought, and absorbed more and more of the land from the native blacks. The Lani were neither military nor political, and reasoned that as long as they were left to their own devices, they were better staying out of the disputes and skirmishes during the white settlement of the region. By the time they looked up from their cooking fires to find that they had turned into a squalid and itinerant people living peasant lives, it was too late.
Most of Morlak’s gang came from here or somewhere similarly ragged and decaying. Some of them, like Tanish, still thought of this place as home, and his mood brightened as we reached the first outlying huts and tents.
“I see Mrs. Emtiga’s ass got out again,” he said, amused. “That thing needs an armed guard and a castle wall.”
I laughed, then risked a question. “Berrit was a Drowning boy too, right? You must have been almost the same age.”
A Drowning boy. That’s what they called them, proudly and with no sense of the bitter irony.
Tanish didn’t look at me. “I didn’t remember him till we spoke a few days ago,” he said. “But, yes. I think we played together when we were little. Then he went to the Westside gang and I stayed here till…”
Till Tanish’s mother died.
“Why did he leave Westside?” I went on quickly.
“Got traded,” said Tanish. “Part of a deal involving the Dock Street warehouse and some building supplies.”
So Morlak bought him. That wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did.
“How did he feel about that?” I asked.
Tanish shrugged. “Didn’t seem to care,” he said. “Said he was going to be something big in the Seventh Street gang.”
“He’d been a steeplejack for the Westside boys?”
“Nah,” said Tanish. “H
e said he’d been a pickpocket, but I think he was really a bootblack. Might have done a bit of thieving on the side, but that wasn’t how he earned his keep. He’d never been up a chimney, inside or out. He pretended not to be, but I think he was scared of heights.”
“So why did he think he was going to be big in the gang?”
“Optimist,” said Tanish bleakly. “Always going on about what he was going to do when his ship came in.”
I nodded thoughtfully, and as Tanish’s face tightened with the memory, I decided to switch direction. “What about you?” I asked, ruffling his hair affectionately. “What will you do when your ship comes in?”
“Ships don’t come in for the likes of us,” he said.
“Sure they do,” I tried, not believing it.
“Then they’ll be rusted-up pieces of kanti,” he said.
I laughed. “Full of rats,” I agreed.
“And holes,” he added. “And sharks would swim in through the holes and live in the hold, ready to bite your legs off as soon as you went aboard.” He grinned at the idea, and that, for the moment, was as good as things were going to get.
Inside the tent city, a gaggle of local women and their kids had already gathered outside the hut. There was a sense of drama brewing in the air, and they paused in their chatter as we approached, nodding at me with caution and watchfulness. Sinchon’s look as I opened the hut’s juddering door was, however, loaded with accusation.
No surprise there.
Sinchon shared his wife’s disdain for his antisocial sister-in-law. He was a hoglike man who scratched a living panning for luxorite in the river above the Drowning. He had found a couple of grains five years ago, but nothing since, and lived mainly off the scraps of minerals he turned up from time to time. The kids laughed at him because everyone knew there was no luxorite being found anymore, but he still thought I was beneath him.
“Where have you been?” he shot, pausing in the whittling of a stick. “The baby is almost here.”
“I’m here now,” I said.
“Your sister needed you earlier.”
“I was working,” I replied, avoiding his eyes.
A Novel Page 2