Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(14)

“You’d better hope I die!” he roared after me in his agony, his blood pooling under him, his voice bouncing off the walls. “You’d better hope that. Because if I don’t, I’ll find you. You hear me? I’ll find you!”





CHAPTER

5

I FLED. BREATHLESS AND half-blind with tears, I dashed out of the alley—across Bridge Street and down the back of the Weavers Arms—torn between the terror that Morlak might be coming after me and the terror that he was already dead.

I blundered into the nearest alley. Not even an alley, really, more a ginnel, a mere crack between the backs of buildings, barely wide enough to turn in. I staggered into its darkest recess, mad with fear and fury, and stopped, hands shaking, fighting down the urge to vomit.

For a horrible, desperate second, I considered returning to the shed and cutting his throat where he lay. Just for a moment. I saw it through a red mist in my head, and it made a terrible sense, and not just for what he had tried to do. Morlak was a brute, a terror to the “apprentices” in his charge, and little better than a slave holder.

The world would not mourn him.

But to return, to slit him open in cold blood, to drain the life from him, that was beyond me.

For now, I thought bleakly.

Who knew what horrors I would become capable of now that life as I had known it had ended? I had no work, no means to feed myself or the child I had stupidly promised to care for, and if Morlak survived, I would not be safe in Bar-Selehm. Ever. He had promised to kill me, and in such matters, the gang leader was a man of his word.

*

I HAD NOWHERE TO go, no one to talk to, so I stayed behind the rubbish bins in the alley, trying to shut the terror and shock inside the iron-braced doors of my heart. Even alone, I could not give way to grief or fear. If I did, I might never get out from under them.

I was hungry, and it was getting cold. It was these that finally drove me out into the evening. I was back at the cement works, where I had begun the day so very long ago. A corner of the alley by the factory was still wet where it had been hosed down, but there was otherwise no sign that a boy had died there. Life had moved on, and insofar as the world had known Berrit existed, it had already forgotten him.

As it will forget me if Morlak finds me. As it forgot Papa.

The iron-braced doors creaked at the thought, but they held, and when I opened my eyes again, feeling my breathing steady and my muscles relax, I knew I had to do something, if only to ease the turmoil in my head.

I studied the wall at the base of the chimney, tied back my hair, then began to climb. There was a ledge ten feet below the cap and several bricks wide. I remembered sitting on it to eat my lunch the last time I had worked this chimney. It circled the stack and jutted out far enough that someone falling from there would hit nothing but the ground 150 feet below. With nerve and poise, it was walkable.

I kept my eyes open for Morlak’s men, but there was little danger of me being seen up here at this time. Even so, I had to go slowly. My hands were unsteady, and I paused midway up to wipe a fleck of blood from my left wrist.

Morlak’s? Or mine from where Florihn slashed my cheeks?

I squeezed my eyes shut to push the memories away, and began to climb again in earnest. I was losing light.

Hoisting myself carefully off the ladder, I moved onto the ledge. Carefully but not slowly. There was no advantage in being in a dangerous situation longer than you needed to be, and caution itself can be dangerous. For a moment, I got one of those rare vistas on the city as the smog shifted and the dying light of the sun picked out the towers, minarets, and spires in amber and gold.

There was no clue that Berrit had been here, no sign of a struggle, though I didn’t know what that would look like, and suddenly coming up here looked like a waste of time, a ruse to get my mind off other things.

If I were him, if I were a boy apprentice on his first day, what would I have done? Why would I have climbed up here before my tutor arrived?

To prove he wasn’t afraid? To make the initial ascent alone so he wouldn’t be embarrassed by how slow and scared he was?

Or because someone told him to?

But if he were meeting someone on the chimney, he’d see them as soon as he came up. Anyone planning to attack him—for whatever reason—would want the element of surprise up here, where one false move meant death.

So if you were his would-be killer, how would you give yourself an edge?

The side of the chimney with the ladder faced the city. The other side faced the river. Even without the usual smoky haze, anyone waiting around that side would be invisible from here, and almost certainly invisible from below. I put my back to the slow brick round of the chimney barrel and inched my way around the ledge.

At first I saw nothing. But at the halfway point, I paused and squatted. There were two distinct indentations in the mortar between the bricks of the ledge, about a foot and a half apart. They were new, unweathered, and sootless.

Hook marks.

*

THE POLICE STATION ON Mount Street was a blank-faced structure of pale stone steps and columns, undecorated but somehow outsized. It loomed out of the gathering evening breathing power and stability. Around it, the flying foxes were leaving their roosts in its eaves, and the lamplighters were rigging their ladders.

For a long moment, I sat on the steps of a bank across the street, looking at it. Reporting Morlak would achieve nothing other than getting me arrested for assault or murder, but that was not why I was there. I got to my feet, crossed the street between a pair of horse-drawn cabs, and ascended the long, tall steps to the entrance.