Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(13)

I ruffled his hair again. “I can handle Morlak,” I said.

He smiled wanly, almost able to believe it, and I pressed a couple of coins into his hand.

“Go get yourself something to eat,” I said. “Don’t go back to the shed for an hour or two. It will be better when everyone else is coming off shift.”

Better meant safer. Morlak was more than capable of punishing my apprentice to spite me for my defiance.

“What did you say to the police?” he asked. The words burst out of him as if he had been saving them up.

“About what?” I asked.

“Berrit,” he answered. “You seemed upset. With the police, I mean.”

“I just don’t think…,” I began, but hesitated. Tanish’s eyes were wide and apprehensive. “They weren’t respectful. To the body.”

It was a half truth at best, but I didn’t want to worry him further.

He considered me, deciding to accept what I had said at face value, and then he was walking away down Ream Street toward the old flag market, where the remaining fruit would be on sale.

*

MORLAK WAS A POWERFULLY built man turning to fat around the middle but still strong, and when he lowered his head, he looked like a buffalo. He wore his greasy hair long, tied back into a glossy rattail. I had hoped I could grab my satchel of tools and my water flask, then get back to the chimney unseen, but he was waiting for me.

He was sitting at his desk at the far end of the empty weaving shed so he had a good view of the door, and I caught the ghost of a grin on his face as I slid in and made for the gallery of rooms where the gang slept. Normally he would be upstairs. He had a chamber above the shed, inside the old elevator tower, which doubled as his strong room. Anyone caught on the stairs to the tower was, he liked to remind them, dead meat. There was no reason to think he didn’t mean that literally. The fact that he was down here at all at this time should have made me wary, but I didn’t think it through, and by the time I was coming out of my room with my satchel, it was too late.

He strode slowly toward me, a swagger in his gait, his bulk blocking the narrow corridor. I was used to his temper, his complaints about my work, his petulance and casual violence, but this was something different. It felt calculated, as if he had been planning it.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t little Anglet, our stray steeplejack.”

I said nothing, but I had my weight carefully distributed, my knees slightly bent, ready to run. Not that there was anywhere to go.

“What time do you call this?” asked Morlak, advancing, pretending to be offended. He grasped my face with one hand and tilted it. “Someone tried to cut a smile onto that sour face of yours?”

I said nothing but peered around him, down the corridor, registering the empty shed. The silence bothered me.

“You owe me a day’s work,” he snarled with feigned pleasantness, still gripping my face. “I’d let you buy your way out of the debt, but you don’t have any money, do you, little Anglet?”

“No,” I said. I was frightened now. I was used to being hungry, being scorned, even being beaten, but I was not used to this, whatever this was, and I didn’t like it.

“No,” Morlak echoed. “I feed you. I pay you. I give you a roof over your head. And how do you repay me?”

I never thought to protest, to mention Berrit or say that my sister had needed me. I said nothing because I knew it would do no good. I was aware of how far away the shed door into the alley was, how stiff it was to open. And then I was aware of the way his hand strayed to his belt buckle and knew, with horrified certainty, that this was not the prelude to a beating. This was something else.

I was and was not surprised. A part of me had known it was coming, had seen the way he watched me. But something had always held him back. Whatever that had been, it was gone. He had been waiting for an excuse, and now he was drunk—not on the reed spirit he stank of every morning, but on the power he had over me. He took a step toward me, and now his legs were splayed a little too, like he was poised to spring.

The corridor dead-ended behind me in a painted brick wall. The only way out was past him, back into the shed’s cavernous main workroom and through the street door, but that seemed so far away that I could barely picture it.

I felt in the satchel with an unsteady hand and came out with one of the iron dogs I used to anchor the ladders and ropes to the chimneys.

He hesitated when he saw it, but then his grin spread, as if I had given him the push he needed. He lunged at me, seizing my wrists so that the spike fell clattering to the ground. He shoved and I fell to the concrete floor at the foot of my bedroom door. He was on me then. One of his massive fists slammed into my face, and my head banged hard against the ground so that the world darkened and swam. In that moment, he fumbled with his clothes, but when he reached for mine, I kicked up once, hard, catching him somewhere between groin and stomach.

It wasn’t a clean hit, but he shrank away, releasing my hands in the shock of the moment, and in that half second of blind, unthinking instinct, I reached for and found the metal spike.

I stabbed once.

It pierced his side somewhere between the ribs, and he bellowed with pain and astonishment.

I did not pause to judge the severity of the wound but skittered out from under him, caught up the satchel, and bolted down the corridor to the door.