A Novel

by A. J. Hartley

  It was a good gutter, sturdy iron, and though it shifted under my weight, it held. I scrabbled with my feet for purchase against the corner wall and shinned up to the roof. The Mahweni tried to follow, but for all his strength, he couldn’t copy my leap and fell in a heap against the wall.

  I moved quickly up the steep rake of the tiled roof, set one foot on either side of the slope, and ran unevenly along the ridgeline, gathering speed for the vault to the next building at the end of the row. Glancing back, I saw Fevel scrambling up after me. He paused when he saw me look, and even in the thickening darkness, something flashed in his hand. A blade.

  I vaulted the gap to the next terrace and kept moving, conscious that the tile was glazed and slippery underfoot.

  Careful.…

  I glanced into the street to get my bearings and saw the big man with the crowbar running along the sidewalk, glaring up at me. For a moment, all the terrible things of the day loomed in my head and I froze, unable to think, the tide of feeling straining to burst out and wash me away.

  Think.

  I needed somewhere they couldn’t follow, and for a second or less, my feet slowed. In my mind, I flew high above the city, looking down on it from the vantage of the steelwork smokestacks I had worked last summer.

  I was on Coal Street.

  One block over was the South Road fish market: I could smell it through the smog, a sourness on the air, like memory.

  Down the side was the Old Dockside theater, whose roof was being repaired. There was scaffolding all over it with access to …

  The Skevington Arms public house, whose fire escape—with a little enthusiastic persuasion—gave on to …

  The railway bridge over the canal and in to …

  The sparrow islands, a tight grid of narrow alleys between warehouses and seedy factory dwellings, where any half-wit could lose himself, even with a pack of bloodhounds on his tail. There were no gas lamps on those streets.

  That will do.

  I ran and jumped, rolled and ran again, then slid the length of a downspout and was across the road before the man with the crowbar knew I was there. I bolted down the side of the deserted fish market and scaled the iron rungs set into the back wall. In seconds, I was across the roof and clambering out over the scaffolding of the theater.

  Fevel was still coming, but I had pulled away from him during that last transition. If I could make it over the pub’s fire escape before he had me in sight, I was home free.

  Well, not home free, but not dead or dragged back to Morlak, which amounted to the same thing.

  My heart was thumping with the exertion of the chase, but I was in my element up here, scrambling, swinging, gripping, and hoisting over iron and brick and stone. And though a mistake might send me to my death, I felt strangely composed, far more than I would have been on the ground. My conscious mind was silent now as other parts of me—arms and legs, fingers and the toes in my boots—took over. I focused on each step, each handhold, each shift of weight, so that the whole escape felt choreographed.

  Just the leap from the fire escape to the painted iron girders of the railway bridge to go.

  If challenged to attempt it any other night, I might have hesitated. Fatally.

  Not tonight.

  I touched the two-headed coin around my neck, then broke into a sprint along the gantry of the staircase. At the end, I planted my hands on the rail and vaulted into nothing, turning slowly in space so that for a moment I looked bound to land in a bloody heap in the street, and then I was grasping the metal of the bridge and swinging gracefully up.

  I knew before I dropped into the sparrow islands that I had shed my pursuers.

  Which is why it was doubly alarming to round the corner, smiling to myself, only to have two white men step out of the shadows before I had even seen them. I feinted right, but one of them deftly seized my wrist, twisted it up between my shoulder blades, and pinned me face forward against the wall.

  “Miss Sutonga,” said the other in Feldish, the man in the linen suit who had been watching me earlier. “What an exciting life you lead! We’d be obliged, however,” he added with polite formality, “if you abandoned your plans for the rest of the evening and came with us.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  THE MAN IN THE linen suit blew a shrill whistle, and moments later a black carriage appeared, driven by a man in a top hat. He did not look at me or the two men as they bundled me inside.

  They were both big men, but they moved with studied efficiency. One of them—the one in the linen suit—had a long pistol with a flared barrel, the other a slender but heavy-looking truncheon, though neither had felt the need to brandish their weapons when apprehending me. They did not wear uniforms or any kind of insignia, but they were not Morlak’s men.

  “There, now,” said the one with the pistol once the carriage rolled off. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” He smiled, but his eyes held mine with a chill frankness that kept me in place better than his comrade’s vise grip on my arm.

  While I had been oddly composed when running from the gang on the rooftops, these two, with their quiet professionalism, scared me. What would happen next, who they were, or what they wanted with me, I had no idea.

  My eyes flashed to the door handle.

  The man with the revolver inclined his head. In a voice as impassive as his face, he said, “Let’s not make things more difficult than they need to be, shall we, Miss Sutonga?”

  “How do you know my name?” I asked as the carriage slowed, then turned and resumed its former rattling pace.

  “All that will become clear,” said the man evenly.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Neither man responded, watching me now as if I had not spoken at all. I had no choice but to sit and wait.

  I wasn’t sure how long we drove. Ten minutes? Twenty? Once a woman laughed—a high keening that sounded like a shout of pain until the end—and once I thought I heard the driver talking as the carriage stopped, but none of it gave me a sense of where we were. I used my free hand to release my hair and tipped my head forward so that it fell about my face like a veil.

  When we finally stopped, the one with the truncheon produced from his pocket a black velvet bag with a drawstring. “Put this on, please,” he said, tossing it to me.

  I looked at it, feeling stupid and afraid. “Put it on?” I echoed.

  “Over your head,” said the man with the truncheon. “It’s a blindfold.”

  I hesitated, suddenly so frightened that I could barely move.

  “Put it on,” said the man, his voice still low and uninflected. “Or we will put it on for you.” He said it matter-of-factly. If there was any emotion beneath the words it was boredom, and somehow this scared me more than if he had threatened.

  I pulled the bag over my head and lost the world entirely.

  In the confusion that followed, I was manhandled firmly but without obvious cruelty out into the night, then into somewhere more confined, where the soles of my boots rang on hard floors. My hands were held behind my back, but I was not bound, and I was guided expertly, so that only once did I jar my shoulder against a doorjamb as I was steered through. Then I was pushed into a chair and released. I snatched the blindfold from my head as the door behind me closed heavily, and I heard it lock as I swiveled to see if I was alone.

  I was.

  The room was unlike anywhere I had ever been, and I rose from the chair with a new sense of strangeness. It was pristine, the floor matted with expensive grass braid, the furnishings fashioned from lustrous, striped timber. Most of the decoration was elegantly northern, and the books that lined the walls were in Feldish, but there were tribal masks in red and black that looked Mahweni, and there was a statue of an elephant god in black stone. There were Lani paintings on the wall, showing the story of the young god Semtaleen, who stole light from the stars to bring fire to man—as Papa had told me when I was very young.

  A candelabrum suspended from a
plaster rose in the center of the ceiling was lit by a dozen tiny glass globes. I stared, barely able to believe it: Each globe contained a grain of luxorite. The light was clear and strong and only very slightly yellow. It would take a Lani day laborer the better part of a year to earn enough to purchase one of those little lights.

  There were two doors into the room, but the only windows were set near the high ceiling and showed only the night sky. I would need to stack at least one chair onto the desk to reach the ledge. I moved to it and took hold of its exquisitely inlaid top, hoping to drag it under the window, but it was too heavy. I was around the other side, bent at the waist, and pushing when I heard the door behind me click open.

  I braced for the impact of an attack, but nothing happened.

  I turned to find a young white man in gold-rimmed spectacles and a crisp suit moving toward the desk as if nothing could be more normal. I say he was white, but as soon as I had made the assessment, I was less sure. He was tanned, though his skin was still several shades lighter than my own, and his hair was black and glossy as the wing of a starling, but when he looked at me through his wire-rimmed spectacles his eyes were a bright and unnerving green. Still more striking, however, was a cruel, sickle-shaped scar, which traced a pale and puckered line right down his left cheek to the corner of his mouth and then back toward his ear. It hollowed that side of his face and twisted his lip alarmingly.

  “Please have a seat, Miss Sutonga,” he said in Lani, as if I had come for a job interview.

  I stared at him, but when he said nothing else, I drifted back to the chair, though I remained standing, trying to look defiant rather than confused and afraid.

  “I apologize for the manner in which you were brought here,” he said. “It was necessary.”

  He was peering over his glasses at a notebook, turning the pages absently as if he were only half aware of my presence. When he looked up, snatching the glasses from his head and flinging them onto the desk, his green eyes were bright and amused. He had thin lips and a lean, intent face that looked sculpted out of something hard, but the scar made beauty impossible. His body was long and rangy, fit beneath his slightly mannered formal wear, and he gave the impression of wanting to sprawl and stretch, even as he perched on his chair behind the desk.

  He nodded to the chair. “I’m sure you would be more comfortable if you sat,” he said.

  Heart racing, I shook my head.

  “As you wish,” he answered.

  He had a northern, cultured voice, and he spoke with the air of one used to being in authority, but his Lani was impeccable, and he was no more than ten years older than I was. Perhaps less.

  He considered my face. “You seem to have cut yourself,” he said.

  “Where am I?” I managed.

  “My home,” he said, as if I should be happy about it.

  I could think of nothing to say.

  “Tell me about Mr. Ansveld,” said the young man.

  I frowned. “Who?” I asked.

  “Mr. Ansveld,” he repeated, enunciating the words carefully. His eyes held mine, and his body was perfectly still.

  “I don’t know who that is,” I said.

  “Really?” he said. “Come now. This will all be much easier if we are honest with each other.” He smiled. It was a thoughtful, knowing smile, and I wondered if I would live longer if I humored him.

  “Who is he?” I whispered, eyes down.

  “He was a merchant in the city,” said the young man.

  “I don’t know any merchants,” I said. “He left?”

  The smile widened, thinning to a tight crease, and he tipped his head to one side, as if I were playing games with him. “In a sense,” he said. “He’s dead.”

  I felt again that strangeness, as if the earth beneath my feet had shifted, changing the world in ways I did not understand. “I didn’t know him,” I said.

  “He was a prominent businessman,” he continued, watching me like a mongoose at a snake hole. “A powerful man.”

  “I don’t know powerful people,” I said. The young man’s probing green eyes were starting to get to me.

  “His business was entirely concerned,” he said, careful as before, “with the buying and selling of luxorite.”

  That last word flicked out with the force and precision of a cat’s pounce, but then just hung in the air between us. I fought to keep any kind of response out of my face, but he nodded.

  “That you know,” he said, smiling again his knowing and uneven smile.

  “I know what luxorite is,” I said.

  “But I imagine you have few dealings with the mineral yourself,” said the man, considering the little bulbs that lit the room. “Not ordinarily, I mean.”

  My mouth felt dry. “No,” I said. “I don’t deal with luxorite.”

  “Not, as I say, ordinarily.”

  He waited, watching, and I felt obligated to shake my head and mouth the negative again. What was going on here? The question rose in my mind and then repeated with a telling variation: What did he think was going on?

  “You are, I am told, the finest steeplejack in the city,” he said.

  I didn’t respond.

  “But I hear you left work early today,” he continued conversationally.

  I nodded.

  “Why would that be?” he asked.

  “I … I lost my job,” I said, looking down.

  “By choice?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that. “Morlak wasn’t happy with my work.” I spoke as carefully as he did.

  The young man nodded. His fingers, which he had steepled together, were long, the nails manicured. “So unhappy, in fact,” he said, “that he sent people to kill you, yes?”

  There was no point denying it. His men—the phrase was odd, considering they all seemed older than he was—had obviously seen as much.

  I nodded once.

  “That’s a curious development, wouldn’t you say? You must have upset Mr. Morlak a great deal.”

  “That’s not hard,” I said before I could stop myself.

  His slitlike mouth widened again unreadably, and the scar quavered. “No,” he agreed. “I would imagine not. But I am curious as to what inspired his wrath on this particular occasion. A businessman such as Mr. Morlak does not give up his best assets easily. I have heard that there are companies who utilize his services expressly on condition that the actual work is performed by you, and judging by the account of the way you evaded his men this evening, I am not at all surprised.”

  I blinked at the compliment but kept my eyes lowered, my hair half masking my face.

  “What did you do, Miss Sutonga? Did you take something of Mr. Morlak’s? Or perhaps, something Mr. Morlak didn’t actually own but paid you to acquire for him? I believe you had a conversation with a member of Bar-Selehm’s excellent police department this evening.”

  I looked up then, bafflement like a curtain of fog parting around a distant prick of bright light in my mind.

  The Beacon?

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out, and at last I sat down to still the trembling of my legs. The chair was soft and comfortable, its timber seemingly molded to my form. It was one of the most perfectly designed objects I had ever touched.

  “There, now,” said the man. “Isn’t that better?”

  I managed a nod, feeling young and vulnerable in ways I had not felt for years, not since I lived in the Drowning and Rahvey had used that phrase of hers to make me do the chores.

  Third daughter a curse.

  I felt it more acutely now, a dragging anxiety edged with the white-hot glow of panic.

  “So,” said the young man, still pleasant, still apparently oblivious to all that was slicing through my mind, but with that same keen-eyed intensity. “Let us talk business.”

  Under his gaze I felt a moment of choice, as if I were standing on a narrow line of crumbling brick high above some factory, knowing that I needed to jump to safety or cling to where I was and hope m
y perch stayed intact. I decided quickly, fighting off the self-conscious paralysis I felt under those curious green eyes.

  “I don’t know what you think I’ve done,” I said, forcing myself to look up and meet his gaze, “or what you think I know, but you’re wrong. Morlak attacked me. Tried to … Tried to force himself on me.” My lock on his eyes broke only for a second. “I fought back and hurt him. It was self-defense. That is why he fired me. That is why he wants to punish me. Nothing more.”

  He sat back and his eyes contracted with thought. The knowing quality he had exuded to this point evaporated, and he was all watchful attention. “Is this true?” he asked at last.

  “Yes. I know nothing about the Beacon.”

  He leaned forward again. “Who said anything about the Beacon?” he asked.

  “That’s why you brought me here,” I said.

  His silence conceded the point. “A boy died this morning,” he said. “Or late last night. His name was—” He scoured his desk for where he had written it down.

  “Berrit Samar,” I inserted.

  “Indeed,” he said. “And he was supposed to be working with you today, though you did not know him, correct?”

  “We met only once,” I said.

  “And what makes you think he might have been connected to the theft of the Beacon?”

  I said nothing, more than tongue-tied. I had no idea who I was talking to.

  “And you believe the boy … Berrit,” he continued, “was murdered. A wound, you said, in the back, yes? Inflicted by an assailant who had been waiting for the boy on the top of the chimney.”

  “On a ledge below the cap,” I clarified. I fished the loop of cord from my pocket and tied my hair back so I could look him full in the face.

  “I think you are right,” he said. “The body has been examined, which—without your report—would not have happened, and the coroner concurs. Death resulted from a single, narrow incision just right of the spine, penetrating the heart.”