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 right. 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.
I thought of Richter’s own factory and wondered—if there was a Heritage connection to the device used to poison my sister’s children—why he had not made the metal shell himself. Perhaps he wanted to maintain what politicians called “plausible deniability,” particularly after his part in the scandal involving the machine-gun-mounted armored tractors. It had taken weeks in court to verify that his works had been commissioned by people within the government and that he had acted “in good faith”—a phrase inaccurate in every way except, alas, technical meaning.
But then maybe it was simpler than that. Richter dealt in large-scale steel. The device I had seen was small and irregular, better suited to a jeweler than a producer of railway tracks, girders, and rolled steel sheet. Though the thing had no aesthetic appeal, it had taken time to weld a frame around all those tiny fragments of ancient luxorite, and however insidious its purpose, it had been the work of a craftsman, not a factory.
By day, Smithy Row rang with hammers beating out their rhythms on anvils and bellows blowing air through the hot coal, but at night it was eerily quiet. It smelled of ash and soot and metal, a tang you could taste in the back of your throat. I squatted on the roof of the Hunter’s Arms, watching for signs of life beyond the fox-headed fruit bats and a lone, skulking jackal rooting through a garbage pail.
I was at the back of the houses and shops in a narrow, unlit alley. Reaching into my satchel, I plucked out an expensive flashlight with a luxorite source and a mirrored lens, which I had purloined from the town house, and carefully rotated its screw cover till a narrow beam of yellow light shone out.
Each of the houses had a front drive for goods haulage closed by heavy iron gates. Harding’s was the third on the left of the row, an untidy place with mounds of coal and barrels of scrap iron all over the place. It was surrounded by a brick wall whose mortared top had been set with fragments of broken bottle, but there was no guard dog, and I made it over quickly and unhurt. The main structure was both house and storefront, but the windows showed no lights, and I set to exploring the yard where the work itself was done. There were two complete forges, each with anvils and matching sheds. The latter were padlocked, but I was getting good with Namud’s picks and had them springing open in under a minute each, holding the narrow flashlight between my teeth. Both contained tools and boxes of work in progress or abandoned. In one was a heavy cabinet with large storage bins. The lock on this was trickier, and I labored on it for several minutes with my tools, listening to the night with mounting irritation. I didn’t want to leave signs I had been here, but if I couldn’t open the lock soon, I would have to set to work with my chisel. I took a breath, inserted a different tension wrench into the lower part of the lock, and started over, working the pick all the way to the back with my right hand, and applying a little pressure on the wrench with my left. When I felt the rear pin rise and hold, I pulled the pick back and did the same with the next, maintaining my half turn on the wrench. Two more, and it finally popped.
I pulled the broad cabinet door open, realizing too late how loudly it creaked on its hinges. On the top shelf was what looked like two sets of full body armor such as you saw in pictures of knights from ancient times, complete with face-covering helmets, all of a dull gray metal I’d wager was lead. Lined up on the shelf below were three of the roughly welded luxorite devices, each as big as my head. Each had an elaborate shutter mechanism fitted with dozens of little metal flaps, all connected to a single lever. I pulled it experimentally, and they opened like the spines of a bush porcupine, revealing panels of brown luxorite that glimmered softly in the darkness, a dull, smoky glow like a poor candle behind a thick amber shade.
Three of them!
This was bad, but presented with the fact of my discovery, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Taking them with me, even if I could carry them, would only delay the danger and would expose my investigation while revealing nothing about who was involved beyond Kepahler.
Go to the police. Find Andrews. They can force the truth from both the smith and the luxorite dealer.
I closed the shutters on the device, shut the cabinet, and locked it. I was out in the yard again when I heard the door of the house slam.