FOR A MOMENT I froze like a roach in lamplight, staring back toward the house, where someone was opening the gates to the drive. Dimly revealed in the soft glow of a gaslight across the street, I saw what looked like a high cart or wagon drawn by a single horse. I snapped the padlock hasp over the shed door latch with clumsy fingers and caught a snatch of unintelligible conversation on the air, as I hastily turned the flashlight hood. The world went dark. They had been gruff, male voices, low and, at least for now, showing no sound of alarm.
I ducked round the back of the farthest shed, feeling my way in the blackness, not daring to sprint across the open yard to the wall over which I had climbed in. There was no real cover there, and I would be seen by anyone who stepped away from the shed, so I reached up the timbered wall as quietly as I could, grabbed part of the frame, and pulled myself up. From there I dragged my way onto the pitched roof and rolled onto my back, listening. When nothing happened for a moment, I walked my elbows a few inches and risked a cautious look down, peering through the night to the pearly glow in the street. I could see that the wagon was russet-colored and that the horse drawing it had a strange blue tinge to its striped face.
Wilderheld orlek.
It was the circus people. It had to be.
I remembered the taciturn knife thrower who had, I was sure, ended the life of his boy accomplice and then denied it with no trace of emotion. I flattened my spine to the roof once more, my heart pounding. Only then did I remember the wagon too. I had been in it. It had been parked outside the Parliament House the day Benjamin Tavestock was murdered, part of the little tableau of equipment designed to look like there was repair work on the building but that merely provided an escape for the assassin via the makeshift refuse chute.
Another sideshow …
I heard more voices, then footsteps coming closer and a rattle of something metallic.
Keys.
“In here,” muttered a voice.
No one answered. I pocketed my darkened flashlight silently, and put the heel of my hand on the butt of the kukri in my waistband, not daring to draw it for fear that even that whisper of sound would draw their attention. I kept very still in case the smallest shift would set the roof creaking, watching the sky above the yard leap into ruddy light as one of them brought an oil lamp to show the way. My guess was that there were at least three of them. Maybe four. I let go of the kukri. Fighting my way out was not going to be an option.
I heard the click of the padlock and wondered desperately if I had left any sign of my presence, relieved that I had not recently bathed. Soap smelled—not much, but enough. I heard the door open and close, but I had no idea if they had all gone inside, so I still couldn’t move. If I made a run for it now and there was some lone sentry out there, perhaps someone skilled with a throwing knife, I was as good as dead.
So I lay where I was, listening in the dark, my back flat against the warm, pine-scented timber of the shed roof, and no muscle in my body stirring. I didn’t hear the cabinet lock turn, but I heard the creak of the door and some muffled words exchanged below me. I felt the rumble of their movement, even their inaudible conversation resonating through the boards of the shed and into my spine. There was a grunt and a gasp, which might have been exertion as one of them picked the heavy devices up, but I had no way of knowing, and then they were leaving again.
I listened for the noise of the locks, but none came, just footsteps and the sound of bodies moving, labored this time.
They’re taking the devices, I thought wildly. You missed your chance!
But there was nothing to do but wait. I heard the clank of the gate, another snatch of conversation, still more distant now, and the sound of the strange blue orlek’s hooves on the cobbles as the carriage turned and moved away. Even then, I waited to be sure, listening, and when I finally rolled and dropped into the yard, I hesitated before running for the wall.
The shed was still open. I could make out the door hanging there. Not so very strange, I supposed, that Harding would leave it like that, but just odd enough to make me look inside. I pulled the flashlight from my pocket and, once I was inside and safe from the view from the house, I rotated the lens cap.
A fraction of a second before the light came on, I knew what I would see. You don’t notice, not usually, especially in the light when the color is so much more compelling, but blood has a smell, sharp and coppery and brimming with alarm.
It hit my nostrils just before the luxorite beam hit the body of the smith. He was lying on the ground, eyes and mouth open in astonishment, the life quite gone from his face, and a familiar wound through the center of his rib cage.
* * *
I MADE FOR THE Mount Street Police Station, though it was too much to hope that Andrews would still be there. The point, as it turned out, was moot. As I came down, Javisha, a policeman, stepped out of the shadows on the corner of Winckley Street and seized me by the scuff of the neck.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he sneered, twisting my face up to his so he could make doubly sure what I was. “Not supposed to be out round here, are you? New laws we have about your sort, or can’t you read the papers?”
“I’m going to the police station!” I said.
“That you are,” he replied with grim amusement.
* * *
“I NEED TO SEE Inspector Andrews!” I protested.
“Oh, do you indeed?” scoffed the policeman as he shoved me through the cell door. There were four other women already inside, three black and one Lani. “Anyone else you’d like to speak to? The Lord Archbishop, perhaps? King Stefan? The lead cellist of the Bar-Selehm Symphony Orchestra? Tell you what: you wait here, and I’ll go get some paper so I can make a list.”
“Funny,” I said.
He slammed the cell door and I turned, meeting the blank faces of the other women, who were sitting in sullen silence on a pair of benches. The other Lani woman was looking at the floor, her eyes red from crying. One of the black women met my eyes, held them, and when I gave her a cautious nod, smiled unexpectedly and returned it.
I sat beside her, and she gave me a sidelong look.
“You wanted to see a policeman?” she said.
“A particular policeman,” I said. “Yes.”
“Only white policemen left.”
“I know.”
She leaned back a little, as if to get a better look at me.
“You asked to see a white policeman?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have met him before.”
She shook her head and looked at the woman beside her.
“This one is crazy,” she observed conversationally. The other woman considered me, nodding.
It was going to be a long night.
* * *
ANDREWS DIDN’T COME FOR me. The three black women and I took turns napping on one bench, coming to a silent, mutual agreement that the Lani woman, who sobbed quietly to herself all night, should get the other bench. I tried to console her, but she turned her face away, ashamed of being there. It awoke a sleeping anger in me, and when morning came and the duty officer arrived to take our names for filing, I didn’t trust myself to speak.
The inspector, it turned out, knew I was there. He intercepted me as soon as I picked up my bag—which, fortunately, had not been searched—walking quickly through the lobby as I stalked ahead, furious.
“I couldn’t come,” he said. “My position is shaky enough as it is. I’m being watched. The last thing I needed is to be associated with a young Lani woman picked up for breaking curfew.”
“So long as you’re all right,” I said darkly.
“I couldn’t have done anything, anyway,” he protested. “Things aren’t like they were. I don’t have the power I had before. Willinghouse is in jail pending—”
“And you are doing what about that, exactly?” I said, turning on him.
“I haven’t had any good leads—” he began.
“The circus was a lead,” I said. “You should have arrested them.”
“On what charge? They denied the boy had been killed, and we had no body and—
“For the killing of the prime minister!” I exclaimed. “You have his body, don’t you?”
“And no evidence that there was anyone with him except Willinghouse!”
“You have my evidence,” I shot back. “I saw a footprint on the roof. I swore to you I’d seen it. Or is that not good enough anymore?”
“For me, yes, but not for the commissioner.”
“Because my skin color makes me blind? A liar?”
Andrews looked away, his lips pursed. He could think of nothing to say. I stared him down, and at last he hung his head.
“These are bad times, Miss Sutonga,” he murmured.
“Worse times,” I said. “They were bad before. For some of us. You just didn’t notice.”
He looked at me then, and the truth of the remark seemed to register slowly.
“So I am beginning to see,” he said.
I nodded. It didn’t make sense to take my anger out on him.
“You need to go to Smithy Row,” I said. “A place called Harding’s. You’ll find some odd armor and a body there.”
“What? Whose?”
“A metalworker hired by Heritage sympathizers to create a toxic device.”
“What?” said Andrews again, dazed.
“The wound in his chest is the same as the one that killed the boy climber.”
That seemed to focus his mind. “You think it was the knife thrower,” he said. He must have been wearing the strange leaden armor for protection against the false luxorite; in it, he would make as good a Voresh goblin man as any in Lani legend.
“I’m almost sure,” I said. “I also know how the boy killer got inside the Parliament House. The evidence is circumstantial, but if you ask the right people—”
“No,” he said, suddenly sure. “Your word is good enough for me. I’ll assemble a team of constables and you and I will return to the circus to make some arrests.”
“Will the commissioner authorize such action?” I said, taken aback by his sudden certainty.
“The commissioner can go hang himself,” snapped Andrews. “I can do this on my own authority and explain myself later. Wait here.”
* * *
IT TOOK NO MORE than twenty minutes for Andrews to gather his team of armed officers. They were, like all the active police now, white, and several of them gave me appraising looks.
“Yes?” demanded Andrews of one of them. “Is there a problem, constable?”
“No, sir,” said the officer, dragging his eyes from me to the inspector. “But…”
“Yes?”
“Wasn’t she in jail last night?” said the policeman, caught between embarrassment and genuine confusion.
“She asked for me and was ignored,” said Andrews, drawing himself up.
“Oh,” said the constable, not really sure what this meant but sensing the kind of professional danger he needed to get away from. “Very good, sir.”
I rode in the lead coach beside Andrews with two other officers armed with truncheons and revolvers as we followed the underground line to Atembe, then down to Great Orphan Street and the Hashti temple. We could see the big top almost as soon as we entered Nbeki, but the closer we got to the park, the more obvious it was that something had changed.
It was quiet, an ordinary morning, without any of the oily bustle generated by the sideshows and their strange, foreign staff. The reason became clear as soon as we entered the park. The big top, its vivid red and gold striped canvas flapping in the breeze, had a desolate and faded air, and felt not exotic and exciting, but tawdry and cheap in the flat morning light and the silence. The sideshows, caravans, carts, games, exhibits, and animal cages, the steam organ, the hawkers, and roustabouts, were all gone. Litter blew through the abandoned big top, and without the aromas of sweet and unusual food, the rutted, dung-heaped ground held none of its former mystique.
The circus, it seemed, had left town.
* * *
THAT AFTERNOON, I WENT with Dahria and Madame Nahreem to see Willinghouse, playing the lady’s maid once more, a role to which my stony silence was well suited. Dahria watched me, not knowing what to say; my father’s death hung between us like a curtain, making us separate, alone, even as we walked together. Sometimes she would catch my eye, and her face would freeze with the stunned pain you feel immediately after being slapped. Her upbringing had not given her the words to navigate her feelings, let alone mine, so she said nothing, fidgeting with her purse and parasol like a child before giving a recital for which she had not practiced. If I hadn’t been so paralyzed by my own feelings, I would have felt sorry for her. As it was, I was almost relieved.
But only almost, because those similarities between the poor and the rich I mentioned earlier were only almost true. We did not handle emotion well, but that superficial resemblance just concealed how different we were. Indeed, though I had come to like Dahria, the news of my father’s death in her family’s mine was a measure of the gulf between us, a marker of her extraordinary wealth and privilege. It somehow also showed the extent to which my family were, as we had always been, little more than tools. That Madame Nahreem’s solution to the problem of Papa’s death had been to hire first Vestris, and then when that unraveled, me, employing us, as if a little money would compensate for our loss, left me cold. The fact that I didn’t know what I would have preferred did not make me feel better.
I imagined Papa’s broken body being drawn up from the black depths of the mine and being inspected by—whom? Willinghouse senior? Madame Nahreem herself? I wondered if my employer had also been there, a keen young man still a student at Ashland University College, Ntuzu, who had not yet set out upon the meteoric political career that had ended days ago with his arrest for murder. He sat before me now, his usually sharp and focused face glazed with hopelessness. They had moved him on the third night, stowing him in a secure cell in the bowels of the Mount Street Police Station a corridor or two over from where Aaron Muhapi was being held. The room was almost identical to the one in which he had been imprisoned in the War Office, a blank, whitewashed brick box with bars across the front and a sliding wooden screen door that afforded him a little privacy. We were made to talk to him through the bars.
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.