“And for the Glorious Third?”
“It was at the Old Red Fort,” said Sarah, gazing through the trees toward the minarets of Old Town, “but it was dismantled when the garrison moved out. It is currently in storage facilities at the public library pending the identification of a suitable future home. It is not, at this time, open to the general public, and all correspondence concerning requests to view materials should be addressed to the office of Colonel Archibald Mandel, Secretary of Trade.”
I stared at her, unnerved as before by the command of her recall and the way it seemed to shelve her personality as it worked. She blinked and frowned, as if just now processing what she had said.
“As Secretary of Trade,” I said, “would Mandel know Willinghouse?”
“For sure,” said Sarah, “though they are on opposite sides of the aisle. They may not be friends, but they work in the same area. What?”
I shrugged.
“Willinghouse has never mentioned him,” I said.
“Should he have?”
“Probably not,” I conceded. “But then there’s a lot of things he hasn’t mentioned.”
“Is he just naturally taciturn?” asked Sarah. “One of the strong, silent types?”
I gave her a sharp look. She was grinning at me.
“He’s my employer,” I said. “I don’t spend much time thinking about his personality.”
“Oh,” she answered, still grinning. “I see.”
I blinked, pushing away the thought of whatever she was implying. For a moment, I felt a strange and swelling sense of vertigo, as if I had put a foot wrong and was a heartbeat away from falling off a tall chimney.
“Does Willinghouse have ties to the Glorious Third?” I asked, my face carefully neutral.
“Not that I ever heard,” she answered. “And if he had a military background, I doubt it would be with them.”
A flicker of something in her manner caught my attention. “Why?” I asked.
“You said he’s mixed, right? Racially, I mean.”
“His grandmother is Lani,” I said, “though you might not know that to look at him. Does it make a difference?”
“To the Glorious Third? I’d say so.”
I gave her a quizzical look.
She munched on her pasty for a moment, then shrugged. “Every Feldesland regiment was racially integrated within forty years of the Settlement War.”
“So?”
“Not the Glorious Third,” she said. “It took them another one hundred and fifty, and when they did, it was through the creation of a colored company—Lani and Mahweni—that was kept separate from the rest of the regiment. Effectively, they were a separate unit created to appease the tribal council and the likes of your boss man’s father.”
“Willinghouse?”
“Willinghouse senior, yes. Led the charge to break up the region’s last whites-only regiment after reports of racially motivated beatings and imprisonments during citywide police actions.”
There it was again, that sense of the girl accessing some unthinking storage region of her brain. But it was different this time. Her voice was edged with bitterness.
“This was all in the papers?” I said.
She shook her head. “Bits of it, cleaned and polished for polite society reading, perhaps, but the guts of it, no.”
“So how do you—?”
“My uncle was one of the first enlisted into the colored unit,” she said, framing the word in a way both snide and a little sad. “Thought he was doing his part for Bar-Selehm’s race relations.”
“And?”
“He wouldn’t talk about it,” she said. “Equal parts discretion, pride, and fear, I’d say. But I’ll tell you this: they made his life a misery. I don’t know the details. I think my mum knew more, but she wouldn’t say anything.”
“Could I talk to him?” I asked.
“You got some special Lani way of crossing over the River of Souls for a cup of chai and a chat?” she asked.
“He’s dead?”
“Two years now,” she said. “Took a head wound during—wait for it—peacekeeping operations during a Mahweni protest over food prices. One of his own people threw a paving stone at him. Didn’t seem bad at the time. Had it all bandaged up, and he was walking around. Making jokes about it. Two days later, he collapsed. Never regained consciousness.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“To the stars we are as flies, and they do not note our fall,” she intoned, one of the bleaker Mahweni phrases. She smiled mirthlessly and turned to watch a vervet monkey squabbling with the ibis. “Well,” she concluded, “this was cheerful.”
I grinned. “Has anyone ever written about it?” I asked.
“Like a newspaper piece?” she asked. “No. Some things are still too hot to touch.”
“For some people, perhaps,” I said. “Maybe one day, you could do it.”
“When I’m living off my column inches instead of how many papers I can flog?” she said, unable to keep the grin out of her face.
“Why not?”
“Well, the Bar-Selehm Standard isn’t the Glorious Third,” said Sarah, “but you won’t find many of my color—or yours, for that matter—turning in stories to delight and inform our ever-expanding readership. One day, perhaps, if we survive whatever the Grappoli have in store for us.”
“You think there might be war?”
“Wars have been fought over less,” she said. “I think the disappearance of the Beacon is unlike any other kind of theft we’ve ever experienced. It’s like our heart. And it’s spectacularly valuable, which makes things dangerous. Whenever you have an international dispute over something valuable, things get dangerous. But in this case, you’ve also got a potential war over a commodity that most of the people who will do the actual fighting could never afford.”
People like her father, she meant, and all the other Mahweni who would be conscripted to protect the Crommerty Street merchants with their NO COLOREDS signs.
“Fight for Bar-Selehm? Sure,” she said. “For liberty, for principle. But for luxorite and those who trade it? I think we’d tear ourselves to pieces long before a shot was fired at the Grappoli.”
I stared at her, registering for the first time the depths of our divisions and the peril Willinghouse had glimpsed on the horizon, barreling toward us like a rogue bull elephant.
“I suggest you find that Beacon,” she said. “And fast.”
“I think I know where it is,” I said, “but I don’t know who paid to get it. What if it really is the Grappoli?”
“Then run,” she said grimly. “And don’t stop till you reach people who have never heard of luxorite or Bar-Selehm.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Now, how do I get into the library’s storage facilities?”
“That,” she said, getting to her feet and brushing crumbs from her dress so that one of the nearby ibis came strutting over, “is your department. Thanks for the pasty.”
* * *
MNENGA SMILED WHEN HE saw me climbing up through the cemetery. He wanted to talk, and brandished the little milk bottles with the rubber teats as if they were a special prize I had won. He started telling me about a dream he had had, in which I was standing down by the river like some water spirit risen from the depths—
I was rude. Brusque, at very least, and I caught the hurt in his eyes, so that I wondered for a moment if my suspicions about him were mistaken. But in one respect at least, it was too late.
“I don’t have the baby,” I said. “That’s what I came to say. I left it at an orphanage.” I had forced myself not to call her Kalla, as if that would make me seem more sure of my actions.
Mnenga looked stung, his big black eyes wide with shock, as if I had slapped him. “Orphanage?” he repeated.
“It’s a place where you take children, who…,” I began, angry that I was having to explain myself. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not my business anymore.”
“Anglet…,” he
said, taking my hand, but I cut him off.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go.”
“Yes,” he said, letting go of my hand with slow deliberation as if he were releasing a bird. “I understand.”
He didn’t, of course. How could he? But I believed that he wanted me to feel better about the terrible thing I had done, and in that moment it felt like the kindest thing anyone had said to me in a long time.
Without thinking, I kissed him quickly on the cheek. His disappointed smile turned into something else entirely.
I fled, feeling guilty and harried.
As I walked, those feelings swelled till they seemed to trail behind me like the great anchor chains wrapped around the massive cleats of the dockside. I tried to shake them off, but the more I struggled, the tighter they became, so that in spite of my haste, I had to pause and be still.
I didn’t know why Mnenga’s care for me bothered me so much. I had liked him. I really had. And had trusted him, which was rare for me and exquisite as the ruby-petaled sunset flowers that sometimes grow from the fractured bricks atop Bar-Selehm’s tallest chimneys. But I didn’t trust him now. He was altogether too convenient, too supportive, too quick with his dreams and his kindness. They couldn’t be real, and if they were, I did not deserve them.
I began walking again, wondering about Sarah’s teasing hints so that for a moment I saw in my mind’s eye Willinghouse watching me shrewdly with his sharp green eyes.
* * *
THE BAR-SELEHM PUBLIC LIBRARY was one of the city’s gems, a domed and colonnaded monument to egalitarian principles the region remembered only partially. It had wide doors, and though from time to time, powerful people had tried to make them narrow, they had survived the attempt, rooted as they were in what had once been so obviously right that they had come to stand for both progress and tradition. It was, perhaps, the only place in the city where you might see whites, blacks, and Lani, irrespective of class or gender, in the same room.
They knew me in the library. Vestris had gotten me my first library card when I was seven, and my record was immaculate. No lost books. No fines. Nothing overdue. It was amazing how disciplined you could be when you knew that there was no one to bail you out of trouble. But my addiction was to novels, not history, and certainly not military records. I spent a long moment studying an unhelpful floor plan and then scanned for someone familiar.
Miss Fischer was an elderly white lady who had worked there longer than I could remember. She was thin, austere-looking, her hair in a tight silver bun, her eyes peering over gold-rimmed reading glasses that she wore on a chain around her neck. Her dress was vaguely funereal, and she was the kind of person you could not imagine anywhere but inside the library’s strictly maintained silence. She watched my approach with the stillness of a heron in the reeds where frogs abounded.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Miss Sutonga,” said Miss Fischer, taking in my slashed and bruised face, “so nice to see you are out of jail.” She said it without inflection, and I colored under her fixed gaze.
“You saw the paper,” I said. “They got the wrong end of the stick.”
“It would not be the first time,” said the librarian. “I assume you have come to read rather than practice your climbing.”
“Yes, Miss Fischer,” I said.
“And you were looking for a recommendation?”
“Actually,” I said, “I am looking for two things. First, where can I see details of recent real estate transactions?”
The heron stirred fractionally, as if something unexpected had swum into view. “We have listings of house sales by county—” she began, but I cut her off.
“I was thinking more of land outside the city,” I said.
The Mahweni didn’t want to go to war with the Grappoli, I reasoned, but that wasn’t all they were protesting. There were rumors of land deals, ancestral territory sold off to the highest bidder. But sold off to who? And was the Beacon somehow a factor in the trade? Were the Grappoli? I had been treating all these things as separate issues, but what if they weren’t? What if this was finally about something ordinary but important: something that fell squarely under the control of Colonel Archibald Mandel, Secretary of Trade? What if the Beacon was the center of something much larger, something people were prepared not just to commit murder over, but which would drive us to war and annihilation?
Again, Miss Fischer’s movement was fractional, a contracting of her eyebrows. She was intrigued but would not dream of asking.
“Fourth floor,” she said. “Cartography. What some of our less erudite visitors call ‘the map room.’ The Regional Transactions card catalog there cross lists sales by date and region.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You have been most helpful.”
“It is the nature of my job, Miss Sutonga, if not my personality. Is there any other assistance I can offer?”
“I’ll need to look at regimental memorabilia as well,” I said. “But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
Miss Fischer maintained her level stare. “So long as crossing bridges doesn’t lead to you scaling the masonry or falling through the ceiling,” she said.
“You can’t believe everything you read, Miss Fischer,” I said.
“Yes, thank you for that,” she answered. “Being a librarian, I had no idea that print was not always reliable. Do come back if you find you need books on flower arranging or how to assemble a steam engine, won’t you? Your interests have become so diverse of late.”
It was, I think, as close to a joke as Miss Fischer ever came, and I shot her a quick, if slightly abashed, smile before heading upstairs.
* * *
I HAD NEVER BEEN on the fourth floor. It smelled different from the books I was used to, though perhaps that was some kind of olfactory hallucination brought on by the places the room evoked. There were racks of rolled-up charts in tubes bound with ribbon, and high ceiling hangers of vast maps drawn on parchment, vellum, and leather. It made me think of standing down by the docks and watching the ships bound for strange and foreign parts.
I studied the various maps and associated deeds and bills of sale, monitoring the way the borders fluctuated by date. Those shifting dotted lines told a tale of steady conquest, a military snatching beginning quickly and dramatically, then turning into the slow rolling sprawl of the last century and a half. The Mahweni territory shrank and pushed into the dry west under the gaze of the watchful Grappoli, while Bar-Selehm swelled like a gorging leech. I saw the Lani’s token independence from the whites who had brought them from their homeland dry up entirely as they became absorbed by the city, and the fracturing of the old Mahweni kingdoms as some tribes assimilated, and others did not.
And then, about forty years ago, it all stopped. The borders solidified, the military incursions and rebellions evaporated as diplomacy, politics, and institutionalized tolerance became the watchwords of the day. Unrest persisted in pockets, and there were occasional demonstrations that turned into riots and police actions, but for the most part the maps grew quiet, even the restless and expanding city growing sleepy with all it had consumed.
But then, a week ago, something had happened. In fact, it looked like somethings, since all the trades were separate and apparently unconnected, but the coincidences could not be ignored, though the map refused to explain them. This was a single event. It had to be. But, I thought, as I hastily scribbled down some notes and rough charts, the sales made no sense.
One was a patch of lush mudflat on the edge of one of the river’s tributaries, while another was a square of rocky crag in the mountains overlooking the city. One raggedly shaped parcel included a piece of coastline, while another was an arid bit of semidesert. There were eight deals in all, totaling no more than a hundred square miles, scattered around the land to the north and west of the city, none of them connecting, all of them traded within the last week by the Mahweni council to an independent development company calling itself Futur
e Holdings. The deals were all signed by the man Mnenga had dismissed as a profiteer, Farrstanga Sohwetti, head of the tribal council.
I was on the brink of a realization. I could feel it. But I did not know what it would be and knew that to find it I needed to learn more about the Glorious Third. I wasn’t sure why, but the prospect frightened me.
CHAPTER
27
THE LIBRARY’S BASEMENT WAS a warren of narrow corridors between floor-to-ceiling cages. The silence was oppressive, so that my footsteps on the varnished hardwood made me feel clumsy and obvious, but as I neared the storage hold for the Glorious Third, I heard something beyond my own movement: the grunting of incautious exertion and the dull thud of something falling. There was a muttered curse, and then what sounded like the shuffling of papers.
I moved quickly and, rounding the corner, saw a man with his back to me, bent at the waist and muttering irritably. He was black, and broad shouldered. On the opposite wall of the cage where he was working was a navy blue jacket trimmed with gold and crimson. A soldier’s jacket.
I straightened up, ignoring the ache of my battered back and shoulders as I took on the stance of a corseted lady. “Excuse me,” I said.
He turned hurriedly, startled, dropping some of the papers he had gathered into his arms, and struggled to his feet. “Yes?” he said, looking me up and down, his gaze lingering on my bruised face. “Can I help you with something?”
He had a tiny scar above his right eye.
“I’m sorry,” I said, all bashful smiles and a voice I had borrowed as best I could from Dahria. “I realize you are not employed here, but I wonder if you might be of assistance.”
He looked momentarily puzzled by the juxtaposition of my aristocratic Feldish and my Lani appearance, then recovered something of his gallantry. “If I can,” he said.
“That’s sweet of you,” I replied, dropping my eyes and pressing my hands together at my waist girlishly. “I’m looking for the storage records of the Glorious Third.”
He blinked and smiled, albeit a slightly baffled smile, and said, “You’ve found them. They’re here. But they aren’t open to the public at the moment, I’m afraid.”
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