Or rather, Dahria and Madame Nahreem were. I was a servant and not expected to talk at all. Not that there was anything to say. Willinghouse was disheveled, unkempt, but he didn’t seem to notice and regarded us with the kind of blank, absent expression that reminded me of the men you saw stumbling out of the opium dens in the docklands.
In truth, the fact that his grandmother and sister were licensed to speak seemed of no particular use. As we sat there, moving between stiff silence and stiffer questions about his well-being and laundry needs—it began to feel like a kind of cruelty. As Dahria didn’t know how to talk to me about my father’s death, so neither she nor her grandmother knew how to talk to Willinghouse about his own impending execution. After a few minutes, the interview began to feel like the corpse viewing the night before a funeral, except that the dead man was sitting upright.
The closest thing to real communication occurred when Willinghouse’s slow gaze found my face and, after acknowledging the bored and burly constable who was chaperoning us, asked simply, “Anything?”
I looked down, defeated, then met his eyes once more and shook my head. Dahria gave me a searching look, and I knew what she was thinking. I might not have firm evidence, but I had certainly made headway. Was I simply reluctant to show my hand in front of the watchful policeman? Was I resisting the impulse to give him false hope? Or was I punishing him for his part in my father’s death?
I wasn’t sure.
I did not blame Willinghouse for what had happened to Papa, but it was inconceivable that he had not known about it. Dahria lived in a bubble, and it was easy to believe that her grandmother had not confided in her, but Willinghouse worked with Madame Nahreem. His sphere was more public than her secretive spidery machinations—or had been until he hired me—but there was no possibility that they had not discussed the matter.
He had known. I was sure of it. He had known, and he had decided not to tell me, and I was suddenly less sure that I wanted to see him released.
CHAPTER
25
THAT NIGHT THE CITY burned literally and metaphorically. Parts of it, at least. Richter’s new civilian militia, decked out in Heritage party uniforms and carrying flags and torches, marched on Old Town and staged a demonstration in the ancient Mahweni Square that had been the original heart of the city before the white conquest. Some of those torches were then stuck through the letter boxes of shops and houses where blacks still lived and worked. The program of speechifying and singing of suitable anthems was punctuated with breaking windows and a handful of beatings administered to dissenters. The police presence watched but did nothing, and the following morning, the few remaining blacks emerged from their shops looking stunned and frightened, their belongings crammed into bags and boxes, which they manhandled into carts. The so-called Resettlement Day was still a week away, but it was, they said, only a matter of time, and a lot could happen before then, none of it good.
In the morning, I visited Rahvey and her family—a considerably quicker trip into the Drowning now that we were living in Morgessa—and was surprised to find Dr. Mendelson completing his rounds.
“I thought they were better?” I said.
“They are,” he replied, “much. But I’m less sure than I was about the source of the contagion.”
“We found it,” I said. “The device containing the green luxorite. They started improving as soon as we removed it.”
“It seemed so,” he replied, riffling through the compartments of his bag and frowning. “But similar cases are emerging inside the city walls. Faster onset and more severe symptoms. I have to consider the possibility that the disease is spreading through human contact.”
“There are new cases? Since when? I’ve heard nothing about this.”
“No,” he said, with a grim smile. “But since the new cases are all in Nbeki, that is to be expected.”
His meaning was plain. Sickness in a primarily black area of the city was not considered newsworthy.
“They began yesterday,” he said. “Same lethargy, same nausea, even some hair loss. I might not have given the matter a second thought had I not seen the same thing here.”
“Yesterday!” I said.
He nodded gravely. “I anticipate the affected persons will show the most extreme symptoms we saw here within another twenty-four hours.” I stared at him, and he nodded once more. “Yes. The strain seems even more virulent.”
“But it’s not a disease,” I said. “It’s not spread from person to person. There must be a device like the one we found.”
“I still can’t account for how that device caused the effects we saw,” he said. “A crystalline mineral that makes people sick? I have to consider more conventionally plausible medical explanations.”
“Where are the worst cases?”
“I told you: Nbeki.”
“I mean where exactly? Which streets?”
“Right in the center.”
“And diminishing the farther you move away from that area?” I prompted.
He shook his head. “That’s why I think my previous diagnosis was wrong,” he said. “It’s all over the area, and it’s not clearly more intense on any particular street.”
I thought furiously. It could not be a coincidence. The same symptoms meant the same cause. I leaned in to see his list, and—somewhat grudgingly—he permitted me.
“What do the asterisks by their names mean?” I asked.
“They don’t actually live there,” he said. “Just staying there short term.”
“Wait,” I said. “That’s it. Nbeki is one of the areas designated for black and Lani according to the new government rules.”
“So?”
“So the area is suddenly awash with people who are just moving into the area, people who are taking up residence with friends and relatives, moving from house to house so that they don’t overstay their welcome as they wait for a more permanent solution.”
He considered this and conceded the point. “So if there is a device—or devices—its effects might be confused as people move around the area,” he agreed. “But unless the device itself is also moving, there should still be a clear area of strongly affected people.”
He pulled a well-thumbed book from his bag and scanned a list of names and addresses beside which he had scribbled case notes in pencil, using an index finger to work through the list, flipping pages as the pattern began to emerge. He rummaged in his bag some more, fished out a roughly folded street map, and pored over it, checking the list of addresses and muttering names under his breath.
“It’s as I said,” he concluded, jabbing a finger at a blank square surrounded by streets. “The epicenter of the infection is here: Nbeki Park. By God, you’re right,” he remarked. “The other severe cases are all people who have recently moved in.”
Nbeki Park, I thought. Of course it is. Everything points back there.
“I believe,” the doctor remarked, “that at the moment, there is a circus there.”
“There was,” I said. “It’s gone now, though no one saw them leave.”
The doctor gave me a curious look, and I realized with a start that—to both our surprises—he was waiting for advice, even instruction.
“Go to whichever hospital officials you trust to put the health of people above all other concerns,” I said. “Move everyone out of the affected area. Tell anyone you meet there—especially the union bosses and factory owners—to help spread the word.”
“Everyone? That’s thousands of people!”
“I’ll find the device and disarm it, but it’s working fast, much faster than the one we found in the Drowning. Minutes could make a difference in fatal exposure.”
“Where should I take them?”
“The Drowning is safe now, but … No. They should stay in the city. The Nbeki device might not be the only one, and it only makes sense to move the people to areas that will not be infected.”
“Such as?”
I chewed my lip, then de
cided.
“Something is coming,” I said. “I feel it in the air. Something is coming now. Move everyone east.”
“To the Soot? The Numbers District?”
“No,” I replied. “I wouldn’t be surprised if those places were targeted too. Move them all the way east, as close to the ocean as you can get and still be in the city.”
“But that’s…”
“Government Center, the Finance District, and the most upscale residential area in the city,” I agreed. “Yes.”
“But, the districting regulations? Almost everyone who is sick is black or Lani.”
“Yes,” I said again. “Isn’t that interesting?”
He gave me a baffled frown that creased his forehead and tightened his eyes, but as the implication of what I had said registered, his face slackened and opened up, till he was staring at me with shock and horror.
“Go to the police,” I added. “Ask for an Inspector Andrews and have him meet me in Nbeki Square. He may need armed support.”
* * *
NBEKI WAS UNCANNILY QUIET for the time of day, even as the doctor and his local outriders got the word out and the people started locking up and moving north across the railway lines into Morgessa and points east. Though I was soon swimming against a tide of swathed and sweaty people, there was a dull, airless quality to the place as if all sound had been sucked from it. It stank already of disease and despair, a scent I associated with the Drowning. Detecting it here inside the city walls filled me with a nagging sense of urgency or alarm, like an impala that feels the eyes of the weancat on her.
By the time I reached Nbeki Park, the area was deserted. The circus was gone, but the big top itself still stood gaudy and derelict, its canvas flapping, its flags streaming. The emptiness of a place built to be stuffed with hordes of noisy people made it all feel dreamlike.
And then there was the effect of the green luxorite.
I could feel it as I got closer. Half a mile north, I had thought I was imagining that faint prickle of something in my skin, the occasional stomach slosh of nausea, but down here, in sight of the great tent, it pressed on my head, chest, and gut like motion sickness. With each step, the dizziness increased, and I felt my breakfast stir in my bowels, as if I had eaten living things. I pushed through the tent flap and into the cavernous arena, and the feeling spiked so that I had to steady myself, wishing I had stolen some of the leaden armor from the dead smithy’s shed. I moved into the silent ring where the sandy earth had been pounded by horse and orlek hooves, cheered on nightly, and again I felt the strangeness unique to an empty theater, a space you have caught not being what it was born to be.
Or maybe it’s more than that.
I was being watched. I would almost swear it. I forced myself to turn unsteadily, one hand clutched to my belly, the other outstretched to help balance myself as I rotated, scanning the rows of empty benches and chairs.
There was no one. And I was getting worse. A few minutes like this, and I wouldn’t be able to function. If I collapsed, I’d die: slowly perhaps, miserably, but it would happen. The magnified false luxorite was turning my body into a seething acidic swamp.
Have to find the device.
It could be anywhere, and the only way I had of determining if I was near to it—like the blindfold game we had played as children, where everyone shouted depending on how close to the treasure we were—was by monitoring the nausea meter of my own body: the sicker I felt, the closer I was.
Not encouraging.
I tried to reason the thing through. Whoever planted the device didn’t want it found, so they would put it somewhere inaccessible where a beggar wouldn’t stumble on it hunting for discarded food. I wondered wildly, and disconsolately, if it could even be buried—in which case I’d never find it in time—but chose to cling to the idea that the device’s toxic effects would be muted if the luxorite panels were covered, even if the material blocking them wasn’t lead.
So, inaccessible, but also in the open …
I looked up.
From the highest point of the big top’s great center hung a helmet-sized lamp on a chain. As soon as I saw it, I knew it, and felt its steady poison streaming directly at me. I also knew I couldn’t reach it, not without ladders. It was suspended from the very center of the big top, under a sheltered hole in the canvas that allowed the smoke and smell of the show to escape, and there were neither poles nor guy cables within twenty feet of it. There was, however a single rope not unlike the one the boy climber had used.
I was used to ladders and scaffold, not to freehand rope climbing, but I took it in both hands and tested it against my weight. All at once the effects of the green luxorite, combined with all that gazing upward finally overcame me. The tent ceiling swam, I slewed drunkenly to one side, then the other, and collapsed facedown in the sandy earth. When I tried to get up, the nausea tugged more powerfully than ever, and I leaned over and vomited into a hoofprint in the dirt.
For a moment I stared blearily at the spattered ground, miserable with the seasick swilling in my guts and the fuzziness in my head, only just resisting the urge to dig my hands into the sand to hold on. As I stared, I realized that the depression in the earth into which I had been sick was not a hoofprint at all. It was bigger than I had thought, and marked with four deeper impressions along one edge.
Knuckles.
I considered it, my slow brain trying to make sense of what I what I was looking at, what I remembered from before, and just as a picture appeared in my head raising the red flag of alarm, I heard the low chuffing cough of the great beast the circus people had left to protect their property.
Xipuku.
CHAPTER
26
THE GORILLA-LIKE CREATURE WAS, it seemed, even bigger in daylight, the bright, unlikely colors of its face more vivid and full of fire. Its yellow eyes were locked onto me, and it sidled as if tracing a rough circle around me, moving from knuckled fist to knuckled fist, suddenly baring its massive teeth in yawning threat, in case I considered drawing my kukri and taking my chances in a fight.
That would be absurd. The creature would shrug off my attack and hurl me into the audience like a rag doll. If I was lucky. If I was unlucky, it would bite me hard enough in the neck to all but sever my head, or simply take hold of my limbs and pull me apart. The xipuku were not local creatures, being confined to the mountain rain forests in the center of the continent, but they had been a favorite horror story of the Seventh Street gang, who had hoarded the boys’ adventure broadsides they found or stole like they were luxorite. I knew all too well what the beast was capable of.
Keeping the rest of my body as still as I could, I reached for the laces of my right boot and unfastened them without taking my eyes off the almost luminous face of the animal. I gripped the heel and worked my foot out as the xipuku took another long and watchful sidestep. Then the same with the left boot. Then the socks. If I ran, the animal would come after me, would be on me in one leap. So I would do what I had been trained to do, though I had only a slender cord for a stairway. Without breaking the eye lock I had with the xipuku, I moved my left hand around until I brushed against the hanging rope and grabbed it.
I got slowly to my feet, feeling my head swim again, using the rope to haul myself upright. The creature became very still, gauging what I was doing, and it struck me that it was not immune to the effects of the green luxorite above us: its fur looked ragged and patchy, and it was drooling long, phlegmy strings. As it watched me gather the cord around my hands, it swayed as if it felt some of the same dizziness I did, though it was clearly much hardier to have lasted this long already. A man living this close to the source would have been dead by now. None of this made it less dangerous, of course. Maybe the opposite.
Still unsteady, head throbbing and stomach churning, I hooked the first two toes of my right foot around the rope as I had seen the boy do, then lifted my left higher and did the same with that. I took the first “step” up the rope, fighting th
e way the whole thing began to swing as I clawed for purchase with my toes, conscious also that the xipuku had stopped skirting me and was coming closer. My only option was up.
So I climbed and got another ten feet before my stomach cramped and I vomited again. Instinctively I twisted my head away so that I wouldn’t get it on myself and nearly lost my grip, so that I had to just hold on for a second, knowing that the feeling was getting worse all the time. My only asset was speed, which was the one thing I dared not risk, not up here on a rope, and not with the xipuku prowling below me. At least it couldn’t come up. The cord was too slim for its massive bulk …
But it might pull you down.
The idea stopped me again, and I risked a look. The creature was considering the rope. From here it was all hulking shoulders and a mounded black head, which suddenly twisted up to see me, the red and blue in its face as startling as the makeup of a clown. It stood up, gripping the rope, and for a moment, that movement alone seemed to halve the distance between me and it, so that I scrambled higher.
Ironically, it was easier to climb with the xipuku holding the cord, anchoring it, so that it was like scaling a pole, hard and unyielding. I looked up again. The device was hanging from a chain only fifteen feet above me. I was weakening all the time, succumbing to its noxious qualities, but I was getting closer. I repositioned my feet, took another long vertical step, then another. My head was thick, my strength failing. My stomach felt like I was seesawing from wave to cresting wave on a stormy ocean, but I knew I had to keep going, though every yard intensified the awful sensation.
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