THE BODY WAS STILL warm. I knew because I touched the woman’s pallid, hawkish face, an almost instinctive act, which horrified me even as I did it. I felt for a pulse, but Agatha Markeson’s eyes—though still aristocratically haughty—were quite sightless. Dead, but not long dead. Minutes, maybe. No more than that.
While I was in the library for my own “protection,” then. That’s when it had happened. Whoever had killed her had known this room would be empty. The suitcase was still locked, so there was no reason to think that whoever had done it had also discovered my disguise and tools. She looked exactly as she had done last time I had seen her—accusatory and affronted, as if at the audacity of someone killing her—except that the high heel of one of her new shoes was missing.
“What do we do?” asked Namud.
He had been silent as usual since we came in, but he had been shocked out of his habitual equilibrium and looked, for once, quite young. I thought fast and decided.
“We leave,” I said. “Now. We get our things and go as if nothing has happened.”
Namud gaped.
“With her lying here?” he asked.
“There is nothing we can do for her. If we stay, we’ll be detained, and things will get very complicated very quickly.”
“Can’t you explain things to Inspector Andrews?”
“Later,” I said, “yes, but not now, not without exposing who we are and who we work for.”
That did it. Namud’s nervous uncertainty evaporated like rain on hot metal. He was the loyal retainer once more, as if I really was someone in authority who knew what I was doing.
“Very well,” he said. “After you.”
As he picked up the suitcase, I set to putting on the Istilian persona and drew my shawl up over my head. The action gave me pause.
“Her shawl,” I said, turning back to the body on the bed. “Where is her shawl?”
There was no sign of it.
“Does it matter?” asked Namud.
“Probably not,” I replied. “Come on.”
And we left her. As Namud locked the door behind us, I glanced up and down the hall. On the wall opposite the door was the vase of lilies sitting on a plinth no higher than the lip of a fireplace. One of the flowers was bent over, its stem broken, and there was water on the ground, as if someone had spilled the vase and then carefully reset it. I stooped to it, running my fingers along the cold, hard edge of the plinth, but then Namud was finished and we were moving to the stairs. All of my former anxieties, all the imposter’s baggage I had been dragging around since I set foot in the building, felt heavier and more cumbersome than ever.
The cab had arrived.
So had the police. Three uniformed officers were standing in the lobby as Wellsley explained the situation to them. Namud gave me an uneasy look, but I shook my head fractionally and smiled at the doorman. It was good that the police were there. That meant they’d find the body quickly and would be able to estimate when Mrs. Markeson had died. The longer she lay there, the harder that would become and the more possible that Namud and I might become suspects. In this case, accuracy and truth were my best alibi.
“Good evening, my lady,” said Wellsley, halting the irritated officer he was talking to with a single raised finger. “I regret the circumstances of your departure.”
“As do I,” I said, “though I hold you innocent of any responsibility.”
He smiled at that, grateful, and a moment later, we were out in the street and climbing into our cab.
“Well done, my lady,” whispered Namud in the dark of the taxi, as he reached out and rapped on the roof with his knuckles so that the driver stirred the horses into action.
“Pass me the suitcase,” I said, watching through the window as Elitus fell behind us.
Namud did so, giving me a questioning look as I flipped it open.
“I’m changing,” I said.
“Here?” he said, disbelieving.
“Lady Ki Misrai has to vanish for a while,” I said. “Maybe forever. Look away.”
This time he did not protest and pressed his face to the upholstered headrest like a frightened child. As I undressed, shimmying into my dark smock and pants, I recalled Madame Nahreem’s making me change in front of her and wondered if she had somehow known how my evening would go.
Modesty intact, I see, she had remarked.
Quite. I unsnapped the latch on the cab door.
“What are you doing?” asked Namud.
“Disappearing,” I said. “Check out of the hotel. I’m going to Willinghouse’s town house. We’ll meet there, and you can tell me why you carry lock picks.”
“I wasn’t born a servant,” said Namud, in the dark.
“I’m beginning to see that. Does Madame Nahreem know?”
There was an odd silence, and I could almost sense his raised eyebrows.
“You don’t know her very well, do you?” he said.
It was a taut, loaded remark that hinted at … I didn’t know what.
“Not yet,” I said.
“You will,” he said. “I think you’ll find it worth waiting for.”
“We’ll see,” I said, trying to recover a little of my defiant swagger and then thinking better of it. “Namud?” I added.
“Yes?”
“Thanks.”
I was out before I realized the scent that I caught on my fingers, a dull and unsettling smell with a metallic edge, was Agatha Markeson’s blood.
* * *
WHATEVER HAD HAPPENED TONIGHT at Elitus involved Markeson, and the sooner I learned all I could about him, the better. The city was asleep, but I knew at least one person who wouldn’t be.
Bar-Selehm’s major daily newspaper was the Bar-Selehm Standard, produced in morning and evening editions, which meant that there were reporters hard at work at all hours. The Standard’s offices sat in an ornate, white-fronted stone building facing Szenga Square, its relief carving of a woman representing Truth glowing a frosty blue in the gaslight. There were lights on in the upper stories, but the lobby was quiet and the doorman wasn’t for letting me in.
“I’m here to see Sureyna,” I said, when he finally eased the glass-paneled front door open a fraction. “She’s a reporter.”
“I know who she is,” said the doorman.
He was white, midtwenties, and he didn’t take kindly to being disturbed from his reading by a Lani girl dressed like a steeplejack. The fact that the person I was asking for—Sureyna, formerly Sarah—was the only black reporter of her age in the building probably didn’t help.
“So?” I said, something of my recent aristocratic attitude resurfacing as he looked me over. “Are you going to let me in or not?”
“Why should I?” he said.
“Because I asked nicely,” I said, “and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.”
“Maybe I don’t need a reason,” he said.
“And maybe I, after I have found a way to speak to Sureyna—who is a friend of mine—will tell her how you treat the people who bring her news.”
His eyes narrowed at that. He might have had some standing in the office, but I was guessing that the reporters—even the junior ones—outranked him. Still he managed a sneer.
“The likes of you bringing news that regular people want to read?” he said.
“You’d be amazed at what the likes of me can do,” I said. It didn’t mean anything, but I said it with certainty and took a step toward him that seemed to give him pause.
“Fine,” he said, opening the door. “But see that you’re out within the hour.”
“Or what?” I asked, hesitating in the door and giving him a level stare. An hour or so ago, I had been a princess. I had broken into and out of a locked room. I had held my own over dinner with Bar-Selehm’s social elite, and I had walked through a cordon of police officers, leaving a dead body in my room. I would not be intimidated by this insignificant weasel.
He took a step back as if I had threatened to punch him, and his eyes looked troubled. Something that he could not quite put his finger on was subtly wrong with the universe.
“Thank you,” I said pointedly, and made for the stairs.
* * *
SUREYNA DIDN’T SEE ME till I was looming over her desk, and her face when she looked up was tired and irritable. That changed immediately, splitting into a delighted grin. She leapt to her feet and folded me in a tight embrace. She does that occasionally. I stood there, embarrassed, and waited for her to finish, then we sat down.
The newsroom was a large open area that took up almost the entire third floor of the building. One end had a series of rooms with doors, all closed and dark, which I assumed belonged to the senior editors who were not in yet. It was a dour environment smelling of old coffee and older cigar smoke. There were half a dozen other reporters at work at their desks, all white, all twice Sureyna’s age or more, though I doubted any of them had her extraordinary memory. Everything she saw got stored away in some cabinet in her brain, ignored till summoned and then reproduced with photographic accuracy.
“What are you working on?” I asked, twisting my head to peer at her great typewriter.
She groaned and showed me, nudging the long-handled bag that she called a reticule—overflowing with books and papers—out of the way.
Cucumber award to Hannah Stewart for 4th year running!
“Ah,” I said. “Yes, I see. The stories that matter.” The paper’s marketing tag. She gave me a bleak smile, so I said, “Want to help me bring about the downfall of the ruling class?”
“Always,” said Sureyna. She was wearing a brown dress with black ribbons, and her hair was concealed beneath a demure white cap so that she looked something between a shopgirl and a kitchen maid. “What have you got?”
“Questions, mainly, about the members of an exclusive club,” I said. “And maybe some connections.”
“How exclusive?”
“Ever heard of Elitus?”
Her eyes widened. “Fire away,” she said.
“What do you know about Thomas Markeson?”
“The shipping magnate?” said Sureyna, head cocked. “Not much. Should I?”
“Not sure,” I said.
“Well, he’s in trade. Import-export, mainly foodstuffs. Well connected but not overtly political so far as I know. Rich, of course.”
“Of course.”
“What about Nathan Horritch?”
“Industrialist, mainly soft goods. Inherited a fortune made by his father through the mechanization of weaving. That was his factory that burned last week,” she added.
“It was?” I asked. “Huh.”
“Is that important?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” I said. “I doubt it.”
“Who’s next?” I mused, consulting a list I had made. “Rathbone.”
“Abel Rathbone, the cabinet secretary?”
“I think so,” I said.
“You think so?” said Sureyna, eyebrow raised. She shuffled through some previous editions and flapped one open to a picture of a familiar lean, serious man with a funereal air.
“Yes,” I said. “Him.”
“He’s one of the most powerful men in the country!”
“Oh,” I said, feeling my ignorance about politics and wondering anxiously what I might have missed because of it. “Right.”
“Professional civil servant,” said Sureyna, reverting to that encyclopedic mode that had so amazed me when we first met. “Well educated, entered the service directly from university, working his way up the ranks in the War Office. Was made head of domestic policy—an advisory position to the prime minister—six years ago, a position he held for two years before rejoining the civil service. Became cabinet secretary six months ago. Not a popular man with your employer’s party.”
“Norton Richter was there too,” I said.
Sureyna’s face darkened.
“Richter,” she snarled. “You know who he is, I take it? What he stands for?”
“I heard him speak in Parliament,” I said. The hatred was coming off my friend like heat. “Where did he make his money?”
“Iron and manufacturing,” she said. “Never heard of the Richter process? His people developed a system for mass-producing steel.”
“He’s that Richter?” I exclaimed. You couldn’t spend as much time around construction as I had without knowing something of Bar-Selehm’s steel industry and its dependence on the Richter process. Half the factories in the city used machines rolled and forged from Richter’s furnaces, and there were catalogs of his wares on the desks of the other half.
“The city contracted him to supply the platform canopies for the Pump Street underground station,” said Sureyna, “and I think he’s about to start rail production too.”
“Any weapons?” I asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“But if someone wanted to build something from blueprints,” I said, liking the idea, “he might be a useful man to know.”
Someone, I thought, who had already advocated for more open trade with the Grappoli, whom he considered the city’s natural—which is to say racial—allies.
“Have you ever read his party’s manifesto?” she asked. While I had been thinking about Richter’s part in the death of Darius and the theft of government documents, she had been rooting through her reticule of notebooks and papers, and now—with a kind of furious triumph—she produced a slim, dog-eared pamphlet emblazoned with the lightning-fist motif. She brandished it. It was titled The Dilemma of the White Man: A Heritage Party Publication. Then, with unsteady fingers, she opened it to a page heavily scored with pencil markings, underlinings and astonished exclamation marks. I leaned in to the small, close type, focusing on a passage she indicated with a wordless stab of her nail-bitten finger.
… which is certainly true of the various black races, their being evidently closer to apes than to white humanity, a fact which goes some way to accounting for their low intelligence and instinctive barbarism. While their innate savagery—directed frequently and spitefully among themselves, as well as with resentment toward their white superiors—is evidence of their patent failings and inability to build anything resembling civilization, it is not—properly considered—a strictly moral deficiency. Morality, as the authorities and religion of our culture have long told us, is the realm of the human and the elevated. To bewail the morality of the black man is to complain about water for seeking out its own level. This is not opinion; it is science, and one must inevitably conclude that the error manifested in a city such as Bar-Selehm is not one made by the blacks, of whom no better can be expected, but by the whites, who have deluded themselves into treating lower creatures as if they were people.
I pushed the pamphlet away, sickened, and looked into the face of Sureyna, whose anger had burned through whatever restraint she had left so that hot tears shone in her eyes.
“See?” she managed.
“Yes,” I said. “Why do you carry it around with you?”
She thought about that and shrugged.
“Know your enemy,” she said. “Understand the way they think, what they say, the things they want to do to you. That way you never let your guard down.”
I nodded, though I was not sure I could live like that.
“But you remember everything,” I said. “Why keep it written down?”
She scowled.
“Some things I choose not to remember,” she said. “Keep them … outside.”
I nodded.
“Tell me about Lord Elwin,” I said, deliberately changing the subject and plucking the name at random from my list of who I had met at Elitus.
She blew out a long breath and whisked the pamphlet away, stowing it carefully as if afraid it might get damaged.
“Socialite,” she said, blinking her way back to business. “Distantly related to Belrandian royalty. Wealthy and well connected, but his family hasn’t done any actual work for about a hundred and fifty years.”
“Last one,” I said. This was getting me nowhere. “Eustace Montresat.”
“Arms dealer and manufacturer.”
That got my attention, and I tried to remember the man I had met so briefly while surrounded by others, conjuring the image of a small mongoose of a man who kept his hands in front of his chest and gave the impression of someone finicky, nervous. Not an obvious killer, but if he dealt in weapons, he wouldn’t need to be. He would have connections.
But then they all did. That was why they were in Elitus to begin with.
“What does he make?” I asked. “Who does he trade with?”
“Another family business,” she said. “Used to be swords and bayonets, but he deals in explosives now too, and has a factory that produces field guns and carriages for the military.”
“Ours?”
“Government contract, yes,” said Sureyna. “But he trades with Belrand directly as well, and is licensed to sell to a limited range of allies, mainly minor principalities. Bar-Selehm will be his biggest market.”
“Not the Grappoli,” I said.
“Not unless he wants to hang for treason,” said Sureyna. “His merchandise gets a full military escort everywhere he ships, and that makes him squeaky clean. He has another factory that builds agricultural machinery, but unless we plan on defeating our enemies by riding over them with steam tractors, I suspect that’s a blind alley. Now, about this story you are supposed to be bringing me?”
“Markeson’s wife is dead,” I said. “Murdered last night at Elitus.”
All sleepiness and impatience fell away from her in a second.
“Murdered?” she exclaimed. “Are you sure?”
“Saw the body myself.”
“You were in Elitus? How?”
“That doesn’t matter for now,” I said.
“Not to you, maybe,” she said, snatching up a pencil and testing its point on a scrap of paper. “I heard the police had been dispatched because of reports of an intruder, but there were no injuries I heard of.”
“Separate incidents,” I said.
“Separate? The police are never called to Elitus. They are famous for their security. Two criminal acts in one night there is quite a coincidence.”
“Isn’t it?” I mused. “Ever heard of a Violet Farthingale?”
The reporter flicked through whatever her unconscious mind might have filed away, eyes half closed, and shook her head.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe no one important.”
“What’s this about?”
“Not sure yet, but I think it’s about Darius.”
“The cat burglar?” gasped Sureyna. Her eyebrows had slid almost to the top of her head.
I nodded.
“You’ve got to give me something I can print,” she said. “If I have to write one more flower show or ‘Discontent in Morgessa’ story, I may kill someone myself.”
“I will, I promise. But I have to do my job first.”
“Which is what exactly? You still working for Willinghouse?”
I looked around and put a finger to my lips.
“No one knows,” she said, and there was a question in her look. “You should be famous, but you’re not.”
“Better that way, “I said. “Montresat’s factories. Do they make machine guns?”
“Machine guns? They might. Why?”
“What about the other industrialist I mentioned: Horritch? Does he make anything that could be used in guns? Steel? Machine parts? Anything like that?”
“No,” said Sureyna. “He’s all about textiles, carpet, sacking.”
“Uniforms?” I tried.
“So far as I know, he produces fabric, not garments. What is this about?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, feeling suddenly stupid and annoyed at how little I had come away from Elitus with. “The factory that burned was one of these, spinning or weaving and such?”
“May have been once,” she said. “But it was derelict. Worthless. The fire brigade weren’t called out till other buildings in the neighborhood were threatened. By the time they got there, it was too late to save the structure, so they just closed off the streets around it and let it burn.”
“Do you know how the fire started?”
“I don’t think anyone really asked,” said Sureyna. “The police were busy that night with the Darius incident, so they didn’t go over there till the next morning, by which time it was all over. As I heard it, even Horritch didn’t much care what had happened.”
“Are they going to rebuild?”
“What for? It was empty. I think he’s looking to sell the land once the remains have been bulldozed. Maybe he’ll build another warehouse, since it’s between the docks and railway sidings.”
I scowled. It felt like another blind alley.
“Why are you asking about guns?” Sureyna prompted, her voice even lower.
“The plans Darius stole that night,” I said.
“A weapon?” said Sureyna. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“So he was working for a foreign power?” said Sureyna, the story taking shape in her head. “The Grappoli!”
I shushed her.
“When I know for sure, I’ll tell you what I can,” I said. My eyes strayed to a bulletin board where headlines and stories had been pinned up so that someone could plan the layout of the page. The word Grappoli leapt off several of the stories. “They’re saying that the Grappoli advance across the north has slowed down. Do we know why?”
Sureyna made a face and waggled her head noncommittally.
“Our war correspondent thinks they are just pausing for breath,” she said. “Regrouping to make sure their supply lines hold, but his contacts say they have also suffered what he calls unexpected reversals.”
“Military losses?” I said, surprised.
“Maybe,” she said. “Seems unlikely. Probably they’re just preparing for another big push. The people, I mean the tribes…” She faltered and shook her head.
“I know,” I said. “It’s awful.”
“No one here cares,” she said. “We’ve tried to cover the refugee crisis, show what the people are running from and what happens, but no one wants to know. Our rival’s circulation has gone up significantly since they started printing those ‘Kick Them Out’ stories. People don’t want information. They want justification for what they already believe.”
She stared hopelessly at the scraps of paper pinned up on the board. Not knowing how to comfort her, I gave her a matey nudge, such as I might give to Tanish, and said, “You need to get back to your cucumbers.”
“Hardly,” she said, getting to her feet and recovering something of her professional air. “I have policemen to interview and, if they’ll let a humble reporter through the door, the staff of the Elitus club, where I have it on good authority that an eminent citizen of the city was horribly murdered. Has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?”
“Just keep me out of it,” I said, wondering if I had done the right thing. “And be careful. We’re dealing with some dangerous people.”
“Want to share a cab?”
“No,” I said. “I’m going the other way.”