Guardian

by A. J. Hartley

  The kitchen.

  An idea struck me. This was an old building, and I was sure there were servants all over the place, though they were kept out of sight and mind even more efficiently than at the Parliament House. The people who met here wouldn’t want to be constantly interrupted by servants offering to clear glasses or make up the fires.

  Last time I had been inside the room, I had noticed that the ambassador had been sitting beside a shuttered hatch in the wall and that he had recently eaten a plate of samosas, which had been served hot. In the absence of scurrying servants, that could mean only one thing.

  A dumbwaiter.

  I checked that there was no one watching me, then set off for the kitchen as fast as I could without running.

  CHAPTER

  22

  I FOUND THE STAIRS down to the deserted kitchens and larders, making sure I kept a good sense of my position in relation to the rest of the house, and chose a shutter on the kitchen wall beside the gas-fed oven. I raised it and stuck my head into the dumbwaiter shaft. It was no more than that: a square hollow that ran up to the higher floors, hung with pull ropes and with metal runners set into the shaft walls like vertical railway lines. The little wooden platform that ran on them was dimly visible two floors up.

  I wasted no time, unfastening my skirt so hurriedly that it tore a little, then pulling myself backwards into the chimney-tight shaft and feeling the walls for hand- and footholds. Leaving the skirt in the bottom, I climbed the ten or twelve feet, which I was almost certain, put me behind the shuttered hatch in the study where Richter and the ambassador were now talking.

  I could hear them already, Richter clipped and haughty as he had been to Dahria. The Grappoli ambassador, by contrast, sounded quite unlike himself. Instead of the suave purr I associated with him, he sounded brusque, cornered. I adjusted till I felt sure of the brackets my boots had managed to find in the shaft wall, then pressed my ear to the frail hatch screen.

  “And I think,” Richter was saying pointedly, “that the balance of power in this relationship of ours has changed quite considerably, and you would do well to remember that. I’m not some minor minister who has to kowtow to you anymore, Alfonse. Your military masters understand that, even if some of your politicians don’t.”

  “Which means what, Norton?”

  “It means, among other things, that you address me as Prime Minister or Lord Protector,” said Richter coldly, though I felt sure that this was another conversation he was enjoying.

  “Very well, Prime Minister,” said the ambassador, “though I would remind you that my allegiances are not to your government but to the vast and expanding Grappoli Empire.”

  “Are they?” Richter demanded. “Some rum tales about your after-hours entertainments have come my way, Alfonse, and I can’t help wondering if your superiors would be as mystified by them as I am.”

  There was the merest shadow of a hesitation, but it was enough to tell me that when the ambassador said, “I’m sure I don’t know what you are referring to,” he was lying.

  “I’m sure you don’t,” said Richter, and though I could not see him I knew he was smiling like a cat. “Just see that you remember who your friends are, or the next few days might prove very difficult for you.”

  “Don’t you dare threaten me!” the ambassador returned, though his defiance felt hollow.

  “Let’s call it less a threat and more an observation,” cooed Richter. “Now. Unless you have something important to tell me, I suggest you leave. You’ve been seen around here too much. Use the drop box like we agreed, and don’t interrupt me.”

  “You are speaking to the Willinghouse woman again?” said the ambassador, sounding both curious and perturbed.

  “I am indeed,” said Richter, and I could hear it once more, that thick, liquid pleasure in his voice. “It is quite delicious to see one’s enemies so utterly discomfited, doubly so when they have no idea just how complete their failure is about to be.”

  “It’s too fast,” said the ambassador, recovering some of his former dignity. “You are overreaching yourself, Richter. You are making mistakes.”

  “Like trusting you, you mean? I think not. I am surprised at you. Clumsy and stupid though you are, made lazy and fat with your so-called duties—all those embassy parties and rich dinners that you are pleased to call work—that you have learned so very little about the world and those who make it turn. Watch and learn, Alfonse. Watch and learn. Oh, and call me anything other than Prime Minister or Lord Protector again, and I’ll have your credentials revoked and put you on the next train. I suspect that your superiors will be most disappointed, and that they will show their displeasure by sending you to run some stinking Quundu prison on your northern borders. Don’t think I won’t. Do not assume past dealings will soften my vengeance if you turn against me. I swear on the very skin I call holy, you cannot conceive the terror of having me as an enemy.”

  He had begun the speech calmly, but as his passion grew, his volume dropped, so that by the end, he was whispering, and I had to press my head to the shutter to catch the words. They chilled my blood.

  I did not move until I heard first Richter leave, then—slower, the chair creaking under him as he left it, the ambassador. I climbed down, spent a moment listening to the silence of the kitchen, then clambered out and put the infernal skirt back on.

  * * *

  TRYING TO LISTEN IN on Richter’s conversation with Dahria would have been pointless and likely to get me caught, so I sat in the silent kitchen with my hands clasped in my lap demurely as maids came and went, turning what I had heard over and over in my mind, and cursing myself that I had missed the beginning of the conversation. All I had was a sense of the mood, of a relationship that had shifted drastically and recently, though what had prompted the change I couldn’t say. What was clear was that Richter wasn’t done. Not by a long way.

  Something is coming. Something big. Something new.

  When Saunders summoned me to join Dahria in the lobby, I moved with reluctance, sure I would learn more if I could find a reason to stay, but that was not an option. I was a servant, which meant I went where my mistress went. I let us get two whole blocks from the Heritage building and did a careful scan to see we weren’t being followed before asking how it had gone.

  She shrugged, a vague, hopeless sort of gesture.

  “Did he believe you?” I asked.

  “Enough to look further into it,” she said.

  “That was to be expected,” I said. “The story will stand scrutiny.”

  “Perhaps,” said Dahria, seeming not really to care one way or the other.

  “This is good, Dahria,” I said. “It’s progress.”

  “If he does what he promised,” she said.

  “You don’t think he will?”

  “For a while,” she said. “Which I suppose is all we can hope for.”

  I watched her, but she didn’t want to say anything else and had taken to rubbing her temples as she did when she had a headache. In truth there was nothing more to say. The delay she had mentioned was indeed all we could hope for, and though I didn’t want to admit it, I knew it wouldn’t last long.

  “Did you learn anything from the ambassador?” she asked. I had told her of my spell in the Heritage dumbwaiter.

  “Not sure,” I said, then shook my head and added. “No, not really.”

  She nodded as if this was to be expected. “Not going very well, this, is it?” she said.

  * * *

  I ESCORTED DAHRIA BACK to the house on Harrington-Clark, but found the butler shutting the place up.

  “I’m afraid we have been given our relocation orders,” he said. “It will take several days to find somewhere suitable, but I have, for now, booked you into an inn in Morgessa.”

  “Morgessa?” said Dahria, not so much outraged as genuinely surprised, as if she hadn’t thought it would really happen.

  “Yes, miss,” said Higgins. “You will find your grandmother the
re waiting for you. She came to town to visit your brother, but was not granted an audience.”

  Dahria’s face closed up as tight as the shuttered house, and I looked away, my mind racing. I had not had time to prepare what I would say to the old woman. Perhaps if I could find a little privacy when we arrived …

  But that was not to be. Dahria and I met Madame Nahreem in the street, en route to the Atembe underground station.

  She read the discovery in my face the moment she saw me. A grayness slipped over her like a shroud. She stood in the street as the crowds jostled her, looking at me, all her studied neutrality drained away so that she appeared as she was: old and tired, spent like a stub of candle. I saw no value in delaying the conversation, even if neither of us wanted to have it.

  “You should have told me,” I said.

  “Yes,” she answered, humbled, the only time I had ever seen it in her. “I should.”

  “Told her what?” said Dahria, confused and slightly alarmed by her grandmother’s chastened manner. “Grandmamma? What is this about?”

  The old woman seemed to age further, to shrink in on herself as if she might collapse into the folds of her black sari and crumble to dust.

  “The Lilac Roller mine,” I said.

  Dahria’s brow contracted in bewilderment, then she shook her head.

  “What about it? It’s closed.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Because of an accident two and a half years ago.”

  “A shaft collapsed,” said Dahria, remembering. “So?”

  “Some miners were trapped,” I said. “Others went in to look for them, but the collapse spread, and though the miners who had been trapped were found alive, those who went in after them were not so lucky. Three men died.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Dahria. “I mean, that’s very sad, but what has this to do with us?”

  “You own the mine,” I said, the tears starting to my eyes again, my face suddenly hot.

  “Well, yes, but mining is dangerous work and sometimes there are accidents,” said Dahria.

  “Particularly when safety standards are not followed to the letter,” I said.

  Dahria opened her mouth, but shock stole from her whatever indignant words she was going to speak, and she turned to Madame Nahreem.

  “Grandmamma, is this true? Father ignored safety protocols, and that led to the collapse?”

  There was a long and loaded silence, uncanny in the bustling street, and then Madame Nahreem nodded. “It was oversight rather than deliberation,” she said, “but yes. Your father was sick and anxious about his political career. He was not paying the attention he should to his properties outside the city. The safety foreman was negligent, and your father did not know about it till it was too late, because he did not look closely enough. I could see it. At the time, before the accident, I knew. I could see he was not engaged with his holdings, and I should have known what would happen, but I was concerned for his health, so I said nothing. I did nothing.”

  It sounded like a speech she had constructed over long, hard nights of brutal self-scrutiny. Dahria stared at her, leaning back slightly as though she needed more distance to focus on her face, but then she shook her head again in confusion.

  “Why are we talking about this now?” she asked. “Why is Miss Sutonga interested?”

  “Because one of the miners who was killed,” said Madame Nahreem, “was Ang’s father, and I wish with all my heart, with every piece of my being, that that were not the case.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  I SPENT THE NIGHT alone with my thoughts and was, for once, glad to get out into the street the following day with a sense of things to do. Tanish, when I found him, was relieved to hear about Aab and the others, whose conditions had stabilized almost as soon as the strange device had been removed. Though he didn’t realize it, he had brought me relevant news. Needing something of a distraction from the Willinghouse family, I was glad of it.

  “So this Kepahler cove,” he said. “Might be the most boring bloke in town.”

  “You tailed him?”

  “All over the city, and not a lot of fun was to be had in the process, I can tell you. Three full days I’ve been following him, and he hasn’t been to a show or entered a single boozer. Lunch at the same fancy restaurant serving rubbish food—trust me, I’ve begged there—one meeting over with his Heritage pals—more fancy rubbish—bed by eleven every night, and the rest of the time either behind the counter of his own shop or trawling for new stuff elsewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Other dealers, jewelers, goldsmiths, and pawnbrokers.”

  “High end?”

  “The ones he does himself,” Tanish nodded, tearing off a strip of naan and folding it into his mouth. “But he bought stuff from a couple of street rats that absolutely wasn’t, unless it was nicked.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Couldn’t tell and didn’t want to look too nosy, you know? Bits of glass, maybe, gemstones. Didn’t seem what you’d call precious, not by the way they was being handled.”

  “Could it have been luxorite?”

  “Nah. No shine.”

  “Really old luxorite?” I pressed. “Old enough that it’s barely even orange and you’d have to be in total darkness to see it glow?”

  He frowned, then shrugged. “Could have been, I suppose. Some of it definitely looked sort of brown. Yeah,” he decided. “Very possible.”

  I nodded, but I already knew this.

  “Did you see him carrying any of this stuff when he went to his Heritage meeting?”

  “Nah,” said Tanish. “Most of it was pretty small. Could have fit in his pockets. But he got quite a lot, so if he took it all to them, he’d need a bag of some sort, and he never did. Only time he went out with a briefcase was when he went to the smithy.”

  I nodded absently, disappointed at how little this was producing, then that last word struck me.

  “Smithy, like a goldsmith’s shop?”

  He shook his head.

  “The goldsmiths and jewelers are all up near Saint Helbrin Street,” he replied, chewing. “I mean an honest-to-God blacksmith’s behind the Hunter’s Arms.”

  “Smithy Row?” I said. “What was a fancy gent like him doing up there?”

  “I asked myself the very same thing,” said Tanish wisely.

  “And did you get an answer?” I said, forcing myself to be patient.

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” he said, pleased with himself. “Bloke by the name of…” He paused to check a scrap of paper with penciled capitals scrawled on it. “Eb Harding.”

  “Kepahler bought something from Mr. Harding?”

  “Sort of. I mean, again, I didn’t get a good look and didn’t stick around to ask questions after one of the yard lads spotted me: didn’t take kindly to Lani street trash mucking up our neighborhood, and now Richter’s in power we don’t have to put up with the likes of you no more—”

  “Tanish?” I prompted.

  “Right,” he said, returning to the matter at hand. “Like I said, I couldn’t really see, but it looked kind of like a helmet.”

  “A helmet?”

  “Or a colander. Sort of. Weird shape. Big. Metal, but with loads of little holes in it. Sparkled a bit in the light. Like one of them stained-glass windows you see in the white churches, but not with nearly as much glass. Maybe not so much a helmet as a big lantern. Does that help?”

  “Yes, Tanish,” I said, rooting in my purse for a few coins. “That helps.”

  * * *

  TANISH’S TALK OF THE smith’s malevolent yard boys gave me pause. Considering Kepahler’s sympathies, it was hardly surprising that he dealt exclusively with whites of a particular stripe, and it seemed likely that any attempt to get information out of them would prove at best unhelpful and at worst seriously hazardous to my health.

  I needed to find out who had commissioned the luxorite device—devices if Tanish’s reconnaissance had been rig
ht. The one that had plagued the girls in the Drowning had been much smaller than the one this Harding character was building now. Which made the one that had nearly killed Aab and Jadary what? A test? A dry run?

  Try out the weapon in the Drowning because no one will take any notice of a few dead brown kids? Decrease the Lani population of the city as you test out your weapon: two birds, one stone …

  The thought turned my stomach as if the false luxorite were working on me.

  We’ll see about that, I thought.

  But how was I supposed to find out if this was a sick project of Kepahler’s own devising, or if he was involved in something larger? And if he was, who was pulling his strings? I knew there was a Heritage connection, but was it more than a shared philosophy of hate, and if it was, how could I prove it?

  I thought about paying Tanish to take up a permanent stakeout on the Harding smithy, but he had already been seen, and there was no one else I trusted who could go unnoticed in the gritty industrial alleys of Smithy Row. I would have to do it myself, and decided I would have a better chance of seeing what clues the place might yield at night.

  Smithy Row lay a few blocks east of Szenga Square and south of the theater district, in the slummy construction yards of those businesses that hadn’t scaled up to full factory size. Here the workforce relied more on muscle than on steam: old crafts that didn’t generate the kind of product bulk that would benefit from the automation provided by the Numbers District, the Soot, and the great chimneyed sheds on the south bank of the river. At their best, they offered a kind of hand-craftsmanship that was as much art as it was labor, particularly in wrought-iron ornamental gates and railings custom-made for the shops and houses to the north and east. But alongside such places were those whose output was simpler and more utilitarian, and who only stayed in business—clung to it, in fact—because their particular product had not yet been snapped up by the city’s great steelworks.