Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(12)
There was a knock at the door.
“Can I come in?”
Sinchon.
“In a moment, sweet,” said Rahvey.
“Just tell me,” he demanded. “Boy or girl?”
The three of us exchanged bleak and knowing looks.
“A girl,” Rahvey answered heavily. “We will keep her for tonight, but Anglet will come for her tomorrow. I’m sorry.”
Sinchon said nothing—expressed no sorrow, no commiseration with his grief-stricken wife, nothing—and moments later, we heard the outside door of the hut slam closed as he left.
Florihn was still clamping the towel to my face, pressing hard to stanch the bleeding, and I felt a flare of rage that, for the moment, burned away any doubt that what I was doing was right.
CHAPTER
4
“WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR face?” asked Tanish, ashen.
“Nothing,” I said, flustered. “Come on. I need to get back to work.”
He looked injured by my evasion, so I hugged him matily and tousled his hair till he fought to get free. He watched me as we walked, not believing my playfulness, but I didn’t want to tell him what I had promised. Saying it outside the hot little hut would make it real, and I wasn’t ready to face that.
“Think you can get us back into the city without the Beacon to guide you?” I asked. A challenge usually took Tanish’s mind off whatever was bothering him.
“Easy,” he said, bounding ahead.
The city—which is to say the colonial city, the original native settlement having been co-opted and assimilated almost three centuries ago—sat on a hill above the ancient river crossing, its municipal buildings rising stately and imposing, pale stone tastefully trimmed and fluted. It had been built on the promise of prosperity and power derived from luxorite, the same luxorite Rahvey’s deluded husband still panned for in the Kalihm. That promise had long since faded and the city had sprawled in other directions, but it was luxorite that had brought the first white settlers.
Luxorite, when first mined, glows far beyond the shine of other precious gems or metals. It has an inner light so potent that a fragment no larger than a grain of sand is as bright as a candle. A few grains together, or a piece such as you might mount in a finger ring, might light a large room in the dead of night. At its mature best, a piece of luxorite is too bright to look at directly, a hard, white light tending to blue that produces sharp-edged shadows. In time it degrades, its light softening and yellowing to amber, but that takes decades, and a single stone might light a wealthy mansion for generations.
A thin seam of the stuff had been exposed by accident on the edge of the river hundreds of years ago. The Mahweni, the black hunters and herders who lived there, treated the place as magical, but eventually began to trade fragments of it for the ironware being worked in the north. Soon settlers came for the luxorite, not because it was beautiful—though it was—but because it was useful, and for a time, it lit their mines and factories as well as their extravagant homes.
But the seam was soon exhausted, and though tiny pockets of luxorite were found nearby, nothing like the expected quantity ever came to light. Soon what little had been mined took on once more the aura of the magical. It was beyond precious. The mines and factories were plumbed for gaslight, and their luxorite sold for more ostentatious use elsewhere. Now, the discovery of an aged grain whose yellow light might fuel little more than a hand lantern would feed a family for several months, but that happened so rarely that the price of the mineral was one of the most stable of all traded commodities in the region. The piece that had been the Beacon was not just priceless; it was also irreplaceable. There was no new luxorite in Bar-Selehm, and the city’s heart now was industry and trade. The Mahweni who had shown the white settlers the first seam now wore overalls and fed coal into the city’s steam engines and factories. And so Bar-Selehm evolved.
It took Tanish and me twenty minutes to leave the fetid sourness of the Drowning behind, and as much again to enter the city proper. We didn’t have money for the underground so we hopped a ride on the back of an oxcart for a half mile, slipping down when the driver turned toward the Hashti temple on the edge of the shambles. Tanish loved that, and I, pleased by his delight, managed to push away any thoughts of Papa; of the boy called Berrit, who had died exactly two years after him; and of the blood oath I had just taken.
Twenty-four hours from now, you will have a child to take care of.…
Beyond a dull dread, the thought meant almost nothing to me, an idea spoken in a foreign tongue.
Well, I thought unhelpfully, you’ll find out.
We walked another half hour, feeling the city grow up around us till the sky became crowded with offices and shops and the world seemed to constrict. I would take the anonymity of the city over the provincial watchfulness of the Drowning any day, or the savagery of the wilderness beyond it, but its hardness and gloom were undeniable.
“I’m going to go and get my tools,” I said. “Maybe get an hour in before it’s too dark.”
“Morlak will be at the shed,” said Tanish warningly. “You might not want to see him today. He was in a bad mood this morning to begin with.”
“Why?”
“Out all night drinking, I think. Didn’t make it back till after we got up, so he probably slept rough. You know what that does to his mood. And since then, he lost his new apprentice.” He looked down as he said it, caught between shame and sadness that this was how Berrit’s death would be seen: like misplacing a hammer or a chisel.