POACHING THE GREAT BEASTS of the savannah was an old Feldesland problem, but it was only recently that it had become a major business concern, ivory and horn commanding astronomical prices on the Grappoli market and elsewhere where the great beasts were exotic, even magical. Once last year, some kids had come upon a one-horn stumbling about on the edge of the Drowning. She was blind and crippled by rifle fire but had somehow got back on her feet even after the poachers had sawed off her horn. She blundered around for a while, bleeding heavily, mad from the pain, and eventually collapsed down by the river. It took another two hours for her to die.
What the poachers took was sold as trophy art or ground into “medicine” overseas. The barbarism of it all, the pointlessness, sickened me, but then, in the stony silence of the police carriage, I had other reasons for that.
The dam had burst, and I was swept away by what came through.
I held Tanish’s body for a long time, and crying seemed to drain me of strength and will, so that I was only partly in the world. The rest of me was nowhere, was nothing, and my sense of what was happening around me was muted, my vision blurred by more than tears, sound echoing faintly, as if coming through fog from a great distance.
Andrews had roared and cursed and said he had been a fool for listening to some slip of a Lani girl, and how was he supposed to look the prime minister in the eye after this fiasco? Von Strahden tried to say that the smuggling bust was a significant achievement, but Andrews told him that no one cared about a few one-horns. We had nothing on Morlak, on Mandel, on Gritt. Nothing at all. It had all been a waste of time.
“I was sure it would be the Beacon,” said Von Strahden, speaking as if in a daze.
“The Beacon!” sneered Andrews darkly. “I suspect that the next people to see the Beacon will be Grappoli troops who dig it out of the rubble of what was Bar-Selehm.”
The two machine gunners were not merely costumed gang members. They were junior police officers from the Fourth Precinct, though who had ordered them to join the operation—if anyone—no one knew. Someone had, presumably, given them the hardware and told them to cut down whoever showed up in the warehouse. They had no interest in the crate and were there—Andrews said—to clean up loose ends. We would never know who hired them because both gunners were dead.
I had done that. I had killed two men whose names I didn’t know, whose faces I never saw. I had done it to save Tanish, and I had failed.
Willinghouse said nothing, just watched me, his eyes hooded, even when the stretcher bearers came to take Tanish away from me. I leaned into his shoulder, staining his clothes with Tanish’s blood, crying as I have never cried for anything before, not even Papa, so that I was not Anglet Sutonga anymore. I was a screaming, writhing, desperate animal of grief and guilt and horror, and it was only Willinghouse’s grip on my shoulders that stopped me from flying into madness.
“Shh,” he whispered. “I will see that he gets the best doctors in the city. He is not dead yet. We will do everything we can. You have my word.”
* * *
THE POLICE WENT TO PICK up Morlak, but he denied any knowledge of the deal, suggesting this was a sideline operated by Fevel and some of the other boys. There was nothing to connect him to either the poachers or the smugglers for whom he had been the middleman, and Andrews—already humbled by his shamefaced report to the prime minister—said they did not have enough even for a search warrant. If Morlak had the Beacon hidden away in the shed, it would likely stay there for the foreseeable future.
Not that I cared. They told me, and I heard, but that was all. I sat at Tanish’s bedside, holding his hand, reading him the story of the cloud forest, the one we always read together, the one Vestris had once read to me, and I spoke to no one else. He just lay there, small and frail, still and silent.
“Sorry,” I whispered through tears. “I’m so sorry, hummingbird. I would have taken you with me.”
Willinghouse said I should go home and rest, that he would sit with Tanish in my place, but I didn’t respond.
Home.
What did that even mean? His home, I suppose he meant, as if I were living there now, their pet steeplejack. No. That was not my home. But then neither was the Drowning. I hated to admit it, but in my heart, home was the weaving shed on Seventh Street, bleak and miserable though it was, because for the better part of a decade, it had been mine, though I could never go back there again.
Morlak. Everything came back to Morlak. I couldn’t connect all the pieces, but he was at the heart of everything, like a spider in his web, and somehow, in spite of the stolen Beacon, and the fort, in spite of Berrit, Ansveld, and the Mahweni herder, in spite even of Tanish, who lay huddled on the bed in front of me inches from death, Morlak was free and likely to stay that way. The police wouldn’t even search his place because he was, in the eyes of the law, a fine, upstanding citizen.…
I stared at Tanish, tears streaming down my hot face.
“I have to go now, hummingbird,” I whispered, squeezing his tiny hand. “I’ll come back. Unless they kill me, I’ll come back. I promise. But there’s something I have to do.”
The police couldn’t do it, but I, as Andrews and Willinghouse had pointed out so many times, was not police.
* * *
I STUDIED THE LINE of the shed roof where it met the tower and chimney stack. It was a smooth red brick that gave no climbing purchase, but there were drainpipes, and in places there were rungs set into the wall. Two of the lower windows had been bricked up years ago, but the top one was shuttered, and I could see how to get to it, though it would take nerve.
Nerve, I had. Nerve and fire. When the dam broke, more than grief gushed out, and some of what came slicing through those awful waters had teeth.
I watched a jackal prowl along the street, its sleek body low to the ground, its ears pricked, and as it rounded the corner and trotted out of sight, I moved.
After shinning up the downspout to the roof of the shed, I picked my way softly over the slates, moving almost on all fours, low and swift like the jackal. At the point where the blockish tower reared up from the shed, I squatted, listening. The city was as quiet as it would ever get. Somewhere down Bell Street, I could hear the distant clank of machinery as the night shift worked on, and there was an occasional boom from the foghorn at the river mouth, but otherwise the night was still.
There were rungs set into the tower wall, though they had probably not been used since the weavers left, and they were rusted and flaking. I took hold of one, tested it, and pulled myself up. I climbed swiftly till I was forty feet above the roof of the shed, then paused. Higher up, the rungs led to the roof, where the old winding gear had been, but the shuttered window to Morlak’s treasure house was on the other side of the tower. A ledge ran around to the window. It was a single brick wide.
I took a breath, then stepped out onto the ledge, my back to the tower and all my weight on my heels. I kept my arms beside me, palms flat to the wall, back slightly arched so that my shoulders brushed up against the brick. I did not look down, not because I was afraid of the height, but because tipping my head might throw off my equilibrium. Right now, I was afraid of nothing. I edged a few inches at a time, out into the night.
I hesitated at the corner, feeling my way around, thinking of nothing but Tanish’s face.
Three more feet and I was at the window aperture. I felt the timber of the shutter and the simple iron hook hinges and taking hold of them, pivoted briskly to face the wall. Death waited, hard and hungry on the cobbles below, but I disappointed him. My mind and fingers probed for the crack between the shutters, then I reached into the satchel, which had lately doubled as a cradle but was now just a tool bag again. I produced a slim and serrated metal blade on a wooden handle. I slipped it through the crack near the top, guiding it down till I found the restraining bolt.
But there was no need. The shutters were not closed properly, and the haft for the bolt had been cut. Puzzled, I put the saw away, wrenched the uneven shutters apart, and climbed through.
The night was moonless, and if there were stars, you could not see them through the smog, so the room was utterly dark even with the window open. I paused, feeling my heart starting to thud against my ribs. I had felt no fear perching birdlike on the tower ledge, but being inside it stirred an old dread.
Morlak.
He would be downstairs, sleeping, perhaps still incapable of coming up to catch me, but I felt his presence like a foul and poisonous odor.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, filling my chest, holding it in my lungs for a moment, before blowing it softly out. I did it again, and felt my heart steady a little. I dragged the shutters closed so that anyone who happened to look up from the street would see nothing amiss. They snagged and squeaked, as if out of alignment, but I got them shut.
I took a stick of candle and a metal box with a close-fitting lid from my satchel, drawing from it a single phosphorous match, which I struck on the brick of the windowsill. The match popped and flared white then yellow as the wooden stick took hold. I lit the candle and shook the match out, taking in the room by the uneven light.
It was a cramped space, the walls crudely plastered, just big enough for an untidy bed, a chair, and in the corner, a chest with a heavy padlock.
Easy.
I squatted down, set the candle in a hardening puddle of its own wax, and got to work with the hacksaw.
But this too had been cut. I dragged the lid open and peered in.
The inside of the trunk was divided into two latched compartments. I opened the one on the left and rummaged through books, ledgers, and files before reaching a bundle of pound notes, a bag of coins, and several small pouches of gold and rough-cut stones.
No luxorite.
I opened the second compartment. It contained a single hessian bag twice the size of my satchel. I pulled on the drawstring neck and opened it. Inside was something shapeless and wrinkled, cool to the touch like metal but yielding to pressure: a dull gray foil. I lifted it out onto the chamber floor and began to unwrap the stiff folds. The object inside was roughly spherical, no bigger than a couple of loaves of bread, but heavy as stone.
I peeled back the metal foil and recoiled from a light more brilliant than anything I had ever seen.
For a second, it was as if the tower room had exploded, but silently, the blaze of yellow-white glare causing every object in the chamber, every splinter of the floor, and every irregularity of the plastered walls to cast hard, leaping shadows. Even with my eyes closed and head twisted away, I felt its pale burning presence, and the inside of my eyelids glowed red.
At last, I thought as I fumbled blindly to re-cover it.
My mind reeled with dizzying exhilaration. I had always known it had been Morlak, and if I acted fast, I could lead Andrews right to him. My heart thrilled to the idea, though I knew it was a poor revenge for Berrit and Tanish even if it was justice as far as the law allowed.
But even there in my one moment of glory, doubt leached my certainty. I thought of the old Mahweni, of Gritt, and the strange, greenish luxorite that had appeared before the Beacon went missing.
Stop, I told myself. Morlak is guilty. You’ve seen the proof. The rest will make sense later.…
I stood there, immobile, paralyzed by a sudden uncertainty, and my eyes fell on the crack between the shutters whose lock had been so expertly cut. I thought of Morlak’s wound, the injury I gave him that had kept him largely immobilized. He could not have brought the Beacon here himself the night it was stolen because he was out drinking and didn’t roll in till morning. And from the moment I fought with him, he had been able to walk—just—but not to climb the tower. Tanish had said so.
And now the voice in my head shifted, became not the mouthpiece of surety and decision, but of doubt and unease.
So what if he didn’t bring it here? What if someone else, someone with the climbing skills to take it in the first place, scaled the tower after you had so conveniently wounded him, forced their way in, planted it here to implicate him? He hasn’t been up since. He might not even know it is here.…
Why would anyone do that, though? Why would someone steal something of such value only to point the finger at someone else?
Because they hated him so deeply? Or because they wanted the city looking in the wrong direction while an entirely different crime was perpetrated, a crime that would lead to war, devastation, and the restructuring of the entire continent?
I considered this, and suddenly it felt as if I were sinking into deep cold water. I had been sure it was all about Morlak because I hated him and wanted him to be responsible so that he could be punished for all he was, but now I was not so sure. The Beacon was so big, so bright, it had seemed that it must be the center of everything that had happened, but in the chill, dark hollow of my gut, I knew this wasn’t true.
It wasn’t about the Beacon. It never had been. I had been wrong. Again. I thought of Berrit; of Billy Jennings, the incompetent pickpocket who had made the mistake of trying to help me; of Tanish, my hummingbird apprentice—and the scale of my failure closed over me like drowning.
Not now. You have to go.
Clumsily, I thrust the Beacon back into the hessian sack and latched the compartment. After the brightness of the light, I could see almost nothing. Hands unsteady, I closed the trunk and scraped up the spilled candle wax. I had just gotten to my feet, ready to make my exit, when I heard the tower stairs creak.
It seemed I had not been so quiet as I thought.
I froze, heart in my throat, listening as the sound came again. This time it was accompanied by something between a grunt and a sigh. A human noise. A big man laboring.
Morlak.
I moved for the window, shoving at the shutters, but one would open only a few inches, and the other wouldn’t move at all. Something I had done when I forced them open—or something that was done by whoever had broken in last time—had jammed them.
I couldn’t get out.