I DID NOT PLEAD for her to let me go. I did not remind her of old times or sisterly bonds. I did not ask her why. I did not tell her we could all walk away from this if only we kept our heads and didn’t do anything rash. That’s what people in books did, and that was where it worked. Not here, not now, and I would not humiliate myself by trying.
But I felt it all. I had known that she was almost certainly involved, but a part of me was sure she would be able to explain, that it had been some strange misunderstanding, that she had been caught up in something driven by other people. But in the seconds after she had spoken in the passage, I looked into her eyes as well as into the muzzle of her gun, and I knew the truth in my heart. She was not the person I had thought her, and she did not care for me at all. I didn’t know why, would never know why, but it felt like a part of me had been cut away, torn out like the rhino’s horn, so that life was pouring out of me through the ragged hole.
Not just life. It was the way I had thought the world was, the things that I loved and valued. That was what was gushing out of the wound Vestris’s betrayal had made. I gazed at her, the beautiful woman who had once been half sister, half mother to me and Rahvey, so graceful, still smelling faintly of sandalwood and violets. But the glow I had always felt around her, the light and warmth that made you feel special when it touched you—that was gone.
“Sergeant Major!” she called. “Come out here, please, and relieve my sister of her gun. She is strong. She may be the third pair of hands you need to do your job.”
I heard him move into the crevice behind me, smelled his sweat, felt his strong hands snatch the revolver from my belt; then he turned me around and looked into my face, smiling without humor.
“Miss Sutonga,” he said in a voice cold as the steel of his sword stick. “You have been in the wars, haven’t you? I am glad to see you again. We have unfinished business.” His eyes were hard and bright, and inside them was nothing at all.
The Tchanka, I thought. The jackal-headed devil-man who slinks under the door and eats your children. Berrit and Tanish—even, somehow, Kalla.
Then he was pulling me roughly around the corner and into the cave.
It wasn’t, of course, the actual cave, the cave that mattered. That was beyond an uneven hole where the rock had collapsed, the hole they were working to plug. This was a mere antechamber, roughly circular, like a bubble in the rock, scattered with weapons, tools, and chunks of stone which they were using to block the way through.
Stefan Von Strahden was inside, lit by the soft glow of an oil lamp. He had just enough dignity to look down, shamefaced, when my eyes fell upon him. I had known as much, but I still felt a strange and sapping misery that was about far more than this one disappointing man.
“You turned on everything you believed,” I said. “Everyone.”
“We aren’t all born onto estates like Willinghouse,” he said, mustering a little defiance, so that his normally open, welcoming face—a face I had instantly liked—looked petulant. “You of all people should know that.”
“I do,” I said. “And that’s why I know that excuse isn’t good enough.”
“You’re dazzled by him,” said Von Strahden, who looked sick and sweaty. “By his elegance and good looks and money.”
“And you are dazzled by my sister,” I said, managing a thin and hopeless smile. “We all were.”
“I didn’t know you were sisters,” he said, as if that made a difference. He sounded weary and a little defeated, even sad. “Not till a few days ago. Vestris never … I didn’t know.”
I turned to face her. She was staring at him, her face hard and unreadable.
“You were a steeplejack?” I said. “Before you became … whatever you are now?”
Her face flashed with anger for a second, and I braced myself for her to slash the pistol across my face, but she recovered her composure and framed a smile, though I saw the sweat glistening on her forehead. Like Van Strahden, she looked greenish, unwell, and there was a spot above her left ear where the scalp showed through her hair.
“That was a long time ago,” she said. “I have moved up in the world, and not by climbing chimneys.”
“Climbing into people’s beds—” I began, but did not finish.
The inevitable blow made the chamber spin, and I went down for a moment. I tasted blood in my mouth, and the raging throb of my already battered cheek, but I felt only vindication and a strange, savage joy.
“All my life I have looked up to you,” I said from the ground. “Everyone back home does. But now that I know you for what you are, I pity you.”
“Home?” snapped Vestris. “You think that stinking shanty was home to someone like me? I’m above it. I always was, and in your heart, you think that you are too.”
I blinked, trying to keep the truth of her remark from my face, but she saw it anyway and smiled.
“What a strange and self-deluding person you are!” she said. “You thought you could be a mother to Rahvey’s brat? You thought you could escape your past by working as an aristocrat’s hired help? Poor, sad little Ang. I once thought us so similar. It’s really rather disappointing.”
“We were,” I said, unable to keep the sadness out of my voice. “Once, when it was just Papa and the three of us—you, me, and Rahvey. We were similar. Did you forget?”
She made to hit me again, and I flinched away. “As for pity,” said Vestris, as if I hadn’t spoken, “save it for those who need it. Yourself, of course. And your apprentice, Tanish.”
She read the flicker of puzzled anxiety in my eyes.
“Oh, you won’t have heard!” she said. “I’m so sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Your little friend died this morning.”
No.
I said nothing as they got on with their work. I felt the cool stone beneath my hands, heard the breathing of my enemies, and saw the brutal cascade of images in my head, things I had done, things I had failed to do, but I said nothing. There was nothing left to say. My eyes had flooded, and though I fought to keep them open, I blinked at last, and tears ran down my face.
I’m not sure how long I stayed there like that, but after a while, as if bored by my silence, the woman who had been my sister spoke again.
“You want to see, little Anglet?” she said. “You might as well. It is, after all, what you will die for.”
I looked up at that, searching her face for a glimmer of doubt or remorse, but there was nothing. I knew she had tried to kill me at the opera house, but I was still surprised. She was implacable, determined, and it was as if I had never seen her before, or if in pursuit of what she most wanted, she had gone through some appalling transformation, a nightmare butterfly. The Vestris who had read to me when Papa could not was gone.
“No,” I said.
“Ah”—she smiled—“a little spirit yet. But there are times when you should do as you are told.”
“You’re going to kill me anyway,” I said.
“True,” she said. “but I haven’t decided what to do about Rahvey’s brat.”
I stared at her. “Why would you harm Kalla?” I asked. “She’s not even Rahvey’s anymore.”
“Because it would hurt you,” she said, as if it were obvious. “You see, Anglet, how much better it is to be truly independent? Too late now. Climb through there, or I will find the child and kill it.”
I did as I was told.
The passage was already half packed with rubble, and I had to squeeze my way through, stooping so as not to hit my head on the low ceiling. Vestris followed, moving more awkwardly than usual and breathing heavily, but the pistol stayed leveled at my back. I wondered if she could really shoot me down, or murder her sister’s infant out of nothing more than spite.
Family is family, said the vestiges of the Lani way in my head.
No, I decided, and not just for Vestris. Willinghouse was right. Some things were more important. Or you made your own family. Tanish was family. So, I decided, was Mnenga. It couldn’t just be about blood.
We walked and the corridor turned, swelled, then clenched again, turning twice more before I was sure. It should have been dark as the inside of a chimney, but it wasn’t, and with each step, the light ahead grew stronger. I rounded the final corner and had to turn away.
I was standing in a vaulted cavern, but the details were impossible to see because it blazed with a hard, white light that pulsed from every inch of the rock surface, a blinding, constant wall of energy so intense, you could almost hear it.
The chamber was made entirely out of luxorite. Even in my despair, I quailed at the enormity of the thing.
“You knew, didn’t you?” said Vestris, who had stayed in the mouth of the passage so she could see me better.
“Yes,” I said, my voice low and flat, eyes shaded from the glare. “This is where the dowager’s necklace came from. That was why you had to get it from her. Couldn’t have people asking too many questions about its origins till you had secured the source for yourself. I assume that’s why Ansveld had to die too, yes? He wanted to know what had happened to the old Mahweni who showed him the stone. Went to his old friend Archie Mandel, which was unfortunate. Gritt met with him in his shop, tried to scare him off, but that didn’t work, so you killed him. I assume it was you. Climbing in through the upper story to cut a man’s throat isn’t really Gritt’s style, is it?”
Vestris said nothing. The light was unbearably intense, and my head was starting to hurt.
“You killed him,” I persisted, determined to say it all just to prove I knew, “but not before you risked a massive diversion. You wanted to suggest Ansveld was involved in some shady dealing with Morlak and the Grappoli, so you paid one of the boys to take a piece you got off the old Mahweni to lure him out. You stole the Beacon and planted it in Morlak’s tower. Then you killed Berrit, like he was just so much trash to be tossed away.”
I paused. It wasn’t just my head that was swimming. My stomach was starting to churn as well, but I saw the blankness in her eyes.
“The boy on the chimney,” I said. “Berrit Samar. You went to his funeral! But first you killed him and left him, as if no one would even notice. I noticed. I wear this in his memory.”
I showed her the pendant, and she considered it with scorn.
“So you are, what? An avenging angel?” she said, grinning with disdain. “I came to the funeral to see if anyone cared about him, anyone who might ask questions. I never thought it would be you. You didn’t even know him.”
I swallowed back my outrage, took a steadying breath, and found, for once, the kind of calm that comes from clarity. “Why does everyone keep saying that?” I remarked, realizing the importance of the question as I said it. “Why does whether I knew him or not matter? He was a child, a boy you murdered. I have to avenge him because I didn’t know him. Because he will never have what other boys his age look forward to. He was snuffed out, all his possibilities ended by your knife, and I am not supposed to care because I didn’t know him? Who are we if we care only for our own, Vestris? What are we? What separates us from the hyenas and the weancats is that we care for those we don’t know, those who have nothing and nobody they can rely on.”
Vestris actually smirked.
“I didn’t know him,” I exclaimed, “but I knew you, and you betrayed me and anything I ever believed in! Berrit called you his friend in high places, but that was a lie. To you, he was just a tool to be thrown away when you had used it. Not to me. No, I didn’t know him, but I will fight for him and people like him because I have to or the world makes no sense, and in that sense, yes, I am his avenger.”
“When did you become so talkative?” said Vestris icily. “You were always such a quiet, secretive child.”
“You killed Berrit,” I said again. “But that was where things started to go wrong, wasn’t it? Morlak never made it up to his tower room because I hurt him, so he never panicked and tried to get rid of the Beacon in ways bound to get him caught. And Berrit’s death, which was supposed to be dismissed as an accident, started to get attention. My attention. You used your friends’ connections to get Morlak to bury Ulwazi, the old Mahweni, in the rubble of the Red Fort, but you didn’t bank on the body being found. That was me too. And it was I who stopped the gunners you hired to wipe out both gangs.”
“You have a smug streak, Anglet, did you know? It’s not attractive.”
“I wasn’t trying to be. Ever,” I added. “Which is one of the differences between us.”
Her smile curdled further. “The Lani are rarely right about anything, Anglet, but I think there might be something to their ideas about third daughters. You really are cursed.”
If there had been any part of me that still thought of her as my sister, it died then, but I felt no pain at the loss. Indeed, it made things clearer, easier. Vestris mistook my silence for doubt or shame and pressed what she assumed to be her advantage.
“What you think you have achieved doesn’t add up to anything,” she said, barely suppressing what I could only describe as pleasure. “You will still die here, and no one will ever find you or this cave. Do you have any idea what it’s worth, sister mine? You can’t. The numbers are not big enough. What you are looking at is beyond wealth, beyond price, even beyond power. This cave is worth nations. Empires.”
And now, for the first time, I surprised her. She stared at me.
“Why are you laughing?” she demanded.
“Because you are all idiots,” I said. “Because you’ve been blinded by your own greed, which is brighter and hotter than the luxorite of which, sister mine, this cave is not built.”
“What nonsense is this?” she scoffed.
“Not nonsense,” I said. “It’s true. You must have noticed the color difference. New luxorite produces a white light tending to blue, but not this. This leans to green. It’s not the same mineral.”
“Even if that’s true,” she shot back, “it doesn’t matter. A minute color variation you can’t even see except under lenses? No one will care.”
“They will when they learn what it does,” I said, taking a step toward her and smiling. “You say this cave is nations, empires. It’s not. It’s hell. It’s disease and death. How are your fingers, by the way? You notice any burning where you have handled the stone? It’s subtle at first, but it’s only the first symptom. The dowager had been wearing hers for only a matter of hours, and she was already getting sick. I thought the old Mahweni herder had been tortured to death while Gritt tried to get the location of the cave out of him, but he just died, didn’t he?”
“He was ill when we found him,” said Vestris, a hint of panic in her voice.
“Yes, I’m sure he was,” I said. “From this place and from carrying pieces of it with him.”
“No.”
“Yes,” I pressed. “I see you are starting to lose your hair.”
One hand started to move to her head, but she stopped it.
“What you have bought, sister mine,” I said, feeling the doors close, the dam setting against the pressure beyond, “what you have killed for, is not just worthless. It’s a death trap, and you will never sell an ounce of it.”
She lunged for me then, swinging the gun at my head in a wild, desperate cut. I caught it, brought my knee up hard into her stomach, and as she crumpled, jabbed my elbow into the side of her face. She went down heavily and, once she hit the stone, did not move.
I took the gun, made sure I knew how to work it, and went back along the passage till I reached the half-blocked entrance into the circular antechamber. The men were working with their backs to me, so I climbed noiselessly through and stood tall, feet shoulder-width apart. Gritt straightened up slowly, turning, as if stirred by some military instinct that told him he was being sighted along a gun barrel. His eyes were hard with fury. Von Strahden stared with shock and horror, and as he put the pieces together, he took an unsteady step toward me. I swung the gun around on him, but even as I did so, I caught my sister’s name on his lips, saw the anguish in his face, and I hesitated.
In that half second, Gritt moved, throwing himself at me. I pulled the gun around, firing once, hitting nothing as the big man slammed into me, almost stunning myself with the deafening report and the muzzle flash in the low light of the cave. I fell hard, losing the gun, Gritt’s weight pinning me down.
“Lani bitch,” he grunted, swinging his fists at my face.
I kicked and rolled, but could not throw him off, and then when it seemed like he might just take a rock and bash my skull in, he was scrambling to his feet and turning toward the sound of voices.
My head was ringing with the weight of his blows, but I managed to get onto one elbow and looked to where two black men had entered the cave. I had never seen them before, and neither, judging by their astonished and uncertain faces, had Von Strahden or Gritt. They were young men, bare chested and wearing only the belted grass skirts of the Unassimilated Tribes, and at shoulder height, poised to throw, they bore short spears with long, leaf-shaped metal tips.
Gritt’s rage was boundless. He did not hesitate, but snatched for the pistol in his belt and swung it round in a low, precise arc.
He pulled the trigger.
It clicked. Empty. It was my revolver. He lunged, snatching up Vestris’s fallen pistol, turning, and aiming at the black boys he so despised.
I was still on the ground, half behind him, but I kicked him hard in the ribs with my steeplejack’s boots, and his first shot went wide. There was a sudden silence. I did not understand why he had not fired again—not till he slumped beside me, one of the Mahweni spears buried in his chest.
I rolled away in horror and revulsion, remembering only at the last instant to take the gun and train it on Von Strahden, who was motionless, braced like a cornered animal.
It was a long moment before I dared consider the two boys, and I saw the resemblance immediately.
“You are Mnenga’s brothers,” I said.
One of them nodded. “Mnenga said you might need help,” he said. “That you were alone among hyenas.”
“Thank you,” I gasped. “I was.”