Guardian

by A. J. Hartley

  An excellent question, and one that could have a dozen answers, several of which involved getting myself killed.

  “Trying to get you your old job back,” I said.

  She stared at me, but her smile was doused as someone came into her line of vision. I turned, and there was Mr. Shyloh, busily orchestrating the preparations. My heart sank. He would know I was not one of the team.

  Reading my look, Bindi said, “What do you need?”

  I nodded at the stairs down to the lower deck. They were only a few yards away, but I could not reach them unnoticed. Bindi’s mouth set, and she gave me a short, decisive nod, then reached into one of the crates and plucked out a couple of wineglasses. As I took a hasty step to the side, she dropped them deliberately.

  Shyloh was on her in a second.

  “What are you playing at, you clumsy child?” he demanded.

  With his focus on her, I was clear to make my dash for the stairs. Seconds later, I was below, closing the door behind me and shutting out Shyloh’s murmuring at Bindi’s incompetence. If I lived through the night, I’d repay her for that kindness.

  If.

  There were two staterooms at the foot of the stairs and then the luxurious main cabin before the carpeted hall led on to what I assumed was the galley. The doors were locked, but I had come prepared. Within a couple of minutes, I had gotten inside what was surely the ambassador’s private suite. The small circular windows meant no real curtains to speak of, so my only viable hiding place was under a three-quarter-scale couch that sat in the corner beside a writing desk. My ribs ached as I wriggled into position and lay, feeling the slow rock of the boat, relieved that the nausea from the false luxorite seemed to have passed.

  I couldn’t have been down there more than a few minutes when I heard voices above me, followed by footsteps on the stairs and the snap of the door latch.

  One set of feet. As they came into view inches from my head, I recognized the patent-leather boots of the ambassador’s dress uniform. He sat heavily in the desk chair, sighed, and began fussing with something that ended with the strike of a match.

  The air was suddenly touched with a curl of cigar smoke.

  I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted to lie there and listen, but I knew in my heart that if I had a chance—however slim—it was to act now, before the parliamentary delegation arrived. I tried to recall Madame Nahreem’s neutral mask, but it wouldn’t come, and in my heart I felt only the kind of true desperation that is passion without hope. I took a breath and rolled out from under the couch, standing slowly, silently, not reaching for my kukri, knowing that by the time I took my place in the chair opposite the ambassador’s desk, he would have a pistol trained on me.

  He did. But his alarm changed to curiosity almost immediately, the result, I think, as much of my manner as my face.

  “You?” he said in bemusement. “Willinghouse’s sister’s maid!”

  The pistol was small and decorative, all nickel plating and dainty ornamentation, but at this range, it would do the job.

  “Among other things,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, realization dawning. “Elitus, no? You bear an uncanny resemblance to a visiting dignitary who came through the halls of that worthy establishment a few months ago.” I just smiled, not bothering to deny it, and he beamed delightedly. “How remarkable! And you have come here tonight to … what? Assassinate me? Kidnap your prime minister in return for Willinghouse’s freedom? You know there are already troops aboard and will be many more soon.”

  “I do,” I said. “And not all of them will be from Bar-Selehm.”

  That quelled his smile. One eyebrow rose fractionally, and he sat a little taller, impressed, I thought, but with none of the playfulness that had been alive in his face a moment before.

  “Ah,” he said. “So you have fathomed our little ruse. Such a lovely word that: fathomed. Plumbed the depths and found out the bottom. Feldish is such a rich language, don’t you think, Miss…”

  “Sutonga,” I said. “Anglet Sutonga.”

  He considered me, then smiled again. “You know,” he said, “I do believe you are telling the truth.”

  “At this point,” I answered. “What else is there?”

  Again the smile evaporated and a heaviness descended upon him. He set the cigar down and gave me a frank look. “What do you want from me, Miss Sutonga?” he said. “I have, as you know, a busy evening ahead.”

  “Cancel it,” I said.

  “That is impossible,” he replied, but not dismissively. He looked weary. Sad.

  “It’s not,” I said.

  “Diplomats serve the interests of their nations,” he said. “I do not make the policies I enact. I do not even always agree with them. I rarely like them.”

  “Especially not this one,” I said.

  “As I said, I do not always get to do what I wish for. I regret that I may have been a trifle unguarded in my speech last time we met. Some things are best left unsaid. Now, if you don’t mind—”

  “You like it here,” I said.

  “Of course. That does not mean—”

  “You like what the city is,” I pressed. “What made it, who made it, and what it might yet be. You don’t hold with your country’s expansion, and you certainly don’t hold with Richter’s Whites First policies. The city as it is now is crumbling, and if you hand it over to the Grappoli and set Richter up as some tin-pot regent, it will cease to exist in every meaningful way. You know this.”

  For a moment he gazed into my eyes, then, as if unable to hold them any longer, focused on his cigar. He picked it up and drew upon it, blowing out a long stream of aromatic smoke.

  “I can’t do anything about it,” he said. “The matter is completely in hand, the result of months of planning. What happens tonight is only the end of something that has been in the works for a long time, like a garment or a piece of equipment that emerges from one of your wonderful factories but began as seed or ore months ago.”

  “Machines can always be shut off.”

  “Not this one. It is an opportunity my government has anticipated for years.”

  “You could stop it.”

  “If I tried, they’d shoot me on the spot.”

  “Not necessarily. Not if you gave them information that convinced them the machine was broken, that their plan was not going to work.”

  “And as soon as they found out I was lying, they would shoot me and then do what they came to do in the first place.”

  “Not if you were telling the truth.”

  He frowned. “What do you mean?” he said.

  “I am not the only one who knows what is about to happen here. You tell the Grappoli fleet that they are walking into a trap. That we know they’re coming. That our coastal guns are about to send their ships to the bottom—the very fathomless bottom—of Bar-Selehm bay. That the streets are full of soldiers ready to defend the riverbanks from incursion. That the city is united against them and they cannot take it, even with our government on their side.”

  “None of this is true.”

  “It’s all true. Tell them. Stall them for an hour, and I swear you will be telling the truth.”

  Again the scowl, but complex now, calculating, still dubious, but wondering.

  “It’s all nonsense,” he said. “Your troops have all marched north to fight a foe that doesn’t exist.”

  “Not all of them.”

  “Enough.”

  “Their absence has been compensated for.”

  “By whom? You don’t have other troops except the civilian militia, who will welcome the Grappoli with open arms.”

  “You make the mistake that Richter makes,” I said, and now I smiled too, if a little sadly. “He is so used to thinking of the city as only the white people that he ignores the rest of us, and believe me when I say that is a grave mistake. Ambassador, we have a lot of other troops.”

  He breathed out then. It was almost a gasp, a slow, vocalized exhalation of real
ization and thought that brought with it a trace of cigar smoke. He laid the pistol down and used his free hand to rub his temples, his eyes closed. “You should be in Parliament,” he said, almost smiling. “But you know what is even more eloquent than you?”

  “What?”

  “Music,” he said. “Samosas.”

  He smiled again, the same sad smile as before, and reached for his waistcoat pocket. Drawing out a small key on a ring, he unlocked the drawer in his desk. He reached in and pulled out a bundle of paper bound with string, which he flipped to me. I glanced at them.

  Letters.

  “What are these?”

  “Reading material for a later date,” he said, suddenly breezy, casual, his tone a kind of audible shrug. “Keep them safe.”

  I stowed them in my satchel, but I was concerned.

  “Does this mean…” I began.

  “You need to go before my friends arrive,” he said, rising. “Both sets. It has been a genuine pleasure.” He extended his hand, and I, dazed by the speed of the transition, rose awkwardly and shook it. “Go. Quickly.”

  I made for the door, but turned before I opened it.

  “You think you are going to die,” I said.

  “Everyone dies, Miss Sutonga. Not everybody lives.”

  He smiled, a generous if slightly strained smile, and nodded me out, sinking back into his chair.

  CHAPTER

  31

  IT WAS QUIET ABOVE decks. The servants had all gone, and the sentries had taken up positions in the prow, on the stern, and on the gangplank, all looking out, rifles shouldered. If I wanted to get off the boat, I would have to go over the side, but I wasn’t ready to leave just yet, and my brief reconnaissance before had planted an idea in my head. I skulked lightly around the hatches to where a rope ladder ran up the mainmast to a railed crow’s nest.

  It was open, but the only lamps other than the yacht’s luxorite running lights were on the deck where the guests would soon be milling in the warm night air. I was pretty sure that if I did nothing to attract attention, I would be unseen up there.

  I paused only to root through one of the open crates and withdraw a long cardboard tube and a slim metal box, both of which I slipped into my satchel. Then I scaled the rope ladder, marveling at how easy it seemed after the affair at the big top, clambered into the railed lookout post, and dropped into a motionless crouch just in time to see the guards changing position as someone shouted formal commands.

  Richter was coming.

  And Mandel, Saunders, and a half dozen other Heritage party bigwigs all in their paramilitary grays. I saw no one from either the Nationals or the Brevards, but then this wasn’t exactly a state occasion, so no one would be on hand to ask what was going on when Richter sold the city down the river to its oldest enemy.

  Unless the ambassador did as I asked.

  I had no idea whether he meant to, and even less if he actually would once presented with the reality of the thing, surrounded by Richter’s men—always men—and the advance guard of the Grappoli fleet.

  And if he doesn’t? If he just saw me as a potentially dangerous enemy agent whom he humored accordingly, what then?

  I didn’t know. Emtezu could get control of one of the fortresses, and then we might yet have a chance, but a bloodbath seemed inevitable either way. Even then, should I remain onboard with Richter, if he won out and I was still sitting tight here, with my kukri in its sheath …

  Well, we’ll see, won’t we?

  The Grappoli ambassadorial sentries went through some ritual greeting and paper checking before giving place to the parliamentary delegation, who had their own red-tunicked dragoon escort.

  So if it comes to a firefight, it won’t just be out there in the night, I thought. It will be all around me.

  I wished I’d brought a pistol.

  I kept very still, watching and listening as the ambassador came from his stateroom below and the speeches and drinking commenced. Moments later, we cast off, and the yacht was steered out into the channel and aimed at the Ridleford pontoon bridge, moved solely by the current of the river.

  It hadn’t really been a pontoon bridge for decades, though it had started as one, a way of crossing the river at its widest point before entering the ocean bay. Where it had once been simply a string of boats lashed together with some boarding for a walkway on top, it was now an imposing structure with a stone tower on each bank and another in the middle where pylons had been sunk to anchor the bridge. On either side of that central stanchion, the iron causeway still sat on barges moored together. Close to the tower, the causeway could be raised to admit vessels too tall to sneak under the metal road. The whole thing was scheduled for demolition and reconstruction as soon as the government found the money and political will to do it, but for now, the bridge was constantly being raised and lowered, lowered and raised, delaying and irritating both the traffic on the river and that which was trying to walk or ride across it.

  It was open now, and would probably stay that way, though there was a walkway that stayed open for all but the tallest ships, so that if Emtezu and his men had not yet made it across to the south bank to secure the second fortress, they would still be able to do so rather than going all the way up river to the Fishwharf. I wondered if I should have been able to hear gunfire from the Northbank Fortress and whether it was a bad sign that I hadn’t, and found myself gazing toward the sea for a sign that anything had happened. There was nothing. The brilliance of the Beacon on the Trade Exchange to the north did not reach anywhere near that far west, and the street lamps supplied only a sprinkling of pearly specks along the riverside.

  Emtezu might be dead, I thought. And the others. Madame Nahreem and Vestris, alone on the south bank. Tanish, Sureyna … They might all be dead, and I might be the last of our makeshift revolution, waiting absurdly, alone up here for something impossible to happen …

  I felt the moment that the boat turned into the stream. It leaned with an almost animal satisfaction as the current took it and angled it toward the open lane of the bridge. Even so, it was a slow drift, and below the party went on, a general hubbub of male voices and occasional rumbles of laughter. The serving staff wore vaguely nautical white jackets with gold trim, mingling discreetly with the guests, loaded with trays of canapés and glasses. I thought vaguely of Bindi and hoped she hadn’t gotten into trouble for what she had done, though I doubted it would matter much in the morning, one way or the other.

  Time passed. The river slid under us, and the yacht inched toward the towers of Ridleford bridge, everyone watching dutifully as we moved cautiously through. Ropes, cables, and ladders hung down the sides of the central tower. Somewhere ahead, in the clustering chimneys away to our left, would be the Dyer Street cement factory where I had been working the day Berrit died, the day that began my relationship with Willinghouse and the six months I had spent discovering the city I had thought I knew. It seemed fitting that it would all end there.

  In fact, we didn’t get that far. As we neared the bridge’s central tower, the yacht seemed to drift and yaw as the current tightened. Something in the water ahead was creating a bottleneck. The skeleton crew ran to peer over the prow, and the ship slowed, skewing slightly and coming to a halt right next to the bridge’s main stanchion.

  “What the blazes is that?” roared Mandel, who seemed permanently outraged by the world.

  “Logjam,” someone called back. “Railway sleepers or something. We’re going to have to clear it before we can get through.”

  “Isn’t there someone on the bridge whose job this is?” demanded Richter.

  “Personnel all cleared out, sir,” said the crewman. “Security precaution.”

  Which probably meant that the laborers who manned the bridge and its operations were black. It was also possible that the logjam was, in some clever way, Tanish’s doing. He had made a cryptic remark as we left my lodging house about slowing the yacht down. I smiled at the thought, and then immediately hoped he was
nowhere near, that he was far away and would never see what was likely to become of the city.

  The water in the bay ahead of us was flat, black, and unbroken, but we weren’t getting any closer to it, however much the crew worked their boat hooks and spars into the mess below. A single coast guard vessel patrolled the area to keep commercial traffic away, but it was a quiet night, and I imagined the men aboard were only half watching when a slim military cutter hove into view, lightless and quiet as a spider. It was almost alongside before I heard the soft putter of its steam engine, and by then, the coast guard vessel was too far away to catch it, though it began its slow curve toward us immediately.

  The coast guard boat wasn’t the only thing to react to our unexpected visitors. The Bar-Selehm dragoons on deck were suddenly agitated and looking for instruction from Richter and Mandel. But when the prime minister gave his orders, it wasn’t to the red-coated troops at all, but to the Grappoli honor guard, who took the dragoons’ weapons and bound the men in the staterooms below deck.

  As the confusion died away, I picked up the engines of two more vessels following in the wake of the cutter, broad shallow barges designed to beach marines. Even from here I could see that they were groaning with the Grappoli advance guard, perhaps a hundred men: more than enough to take and hold the riverbank until the rest arrived.

  Through all this, I held motionless vigil, watching the ambassador for signs of mood or intent, but he did not react until the Grappoli vessel was moored to a cleat on our port side and four men in uniform came aboard. As they did so, I realized what I should have known earlier. I was too high to hear what was about to be said. Whatever the consequences for me—and they did not look good—I had to go down. Perhaps if I stayed just fifteen feet up the mast on the rope ladder, I could remain outside the lamplight …

  I began the downward climb, aware that the tone of the discussion on deck seemed cordial, aware also of the two military barges jostling for position as they made for the riverbank. The invasion, for that was what it was, was about to start, and it seemed no one would notice. I looked from my place in the dark canopy of sky to the warmly lit deck below and saw the snapping bows and formal handshakes of amiable diplomacy, so that I was unsurprised when the darkness was suddenly rent by a brilliant flash of light, which left a cloud of acrid, bluish smoke. They had brought an official photographer to document the historic moment.