Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(17)



He did not look back.

I should have slunk away, climbed the broken stone wall up onto the courtyard roof, and melted into the night, but I didn’t. I waited, watching him go, so I was facing Fevel and the other man as they came through the back door, looking for him.

Fevel was a weasel of a boy, fifteen, Lani, and skinny—all bone, sinew, and long muscles. After me—and not by much—he was the best climber in the gang. I’d split his lip for him once when I caught him stealing pennies from my room, but that was over a year ago. He was bigger now. The man he was with was older and black. I had seen him around the shed but did not know his name. He carried a heavy crowbar in arms with biceps that rolled like kegs of brandy.

I took a step backwards, but it was too late. Fevel had seen me. He pointed, eyes and mouth wide, savage, and then they were both coming at me, crossing the courtyard with vengeful purpose.

I dragged myself up just as Fevel reached me, so that for a moment he was snatching at air as I scrambled away. I didn’t need to look back to know he was coming after me. I ran along the roof, then dropped softly in the alley, not breaking stride as my boots slipped on the cobbles. My pounding feet echoed, and then I was out the other end and running.

At the corner of Randolph Road I risked a glance over my shoulder. They were gaining on me. I made another turn straight through the bare fruit stalls of Inyoka Court, and a pair of monkeys skipped out of my way, whooping and chattering in alarm. I overturned a garbage crate, but my pursuers vaulted and dodged without slowing.

The Mahweni with the crowbar was closing fast, his massive strides eating up the road between us like some great steam-powered machine. While I was starting to tire, he seemed to have hit a steady rhythm. I had no more than a few seconds.

A wagon sat on the corner of the square, one of the high, four-sided things they used to ferry crates of fruit and vegetables. I ran straight at it, timed my jump off the wheel rim onto the top in a scrambling flurry of fingers and torn nails, and landed in a powerful crouch behind the driver’s seat. The black man tried to drag himself up, but I kicked at his hands, and he hesitated, then swung the iron bar murderously at me. I hopped back, but the crowbar splintered a crate inches from my arm. I retreated, using the height of the wagon as a springboard up to the gutter of the drapers’ on the corner.

It was a good gutter, sturdy iron, and though it shifted under my weight, it held. I scrabbled with my feet for purchase against the corner wall and shinned up to the roof. The Mahweni tried to follow, but for all his strength, he couldn’t copy my leap and fell in a heap against the wall.

I moved quickly up the steep rake of the tiled roof, set one foot on either side of the slope, and ran unevenly along the ridgeline, gathering speed for the vault to the next building at the end of the row. Glancing back, I saw Fevel scrambling up after me. He paused when he saw me look, and even in the thickening darkness, something flashed in his hand. A blade.

I vaulted the gap to the next terrace and kept moving, conscious that the tile was glazed and slippery underfoot.

Careful.…

I glanced into the street to get my bearings and saw the big man with the crowbar running along the sidewalk, glaring up at me. For a moment, all the terrible things of the day loomed in my head and I froze, unable to think, the tide of feeling straining to burst out and wash me away.

Think.

I needed somewhere they couldn’t follow, and for a second or less, my feet slowed. In my mind, I flew high above the city, looking down on it from the vantage of the steelwork smokestacks I had worked last summer.

I was on Coal Street.

One block over was the South Road fish market: I could smell it through the smog, a sourness on the air, like memory.

Down the side was the Old Dockside theater, whose roof was being repaired. There was scaffolding all over it with access to …

The Skevington Arms public house, whose fire escape—with a little enthusiastic persuasion—gave on to …

The railway bridge over the canal and in to …

The sparrow islands, a tight grid of narrow alleys between warehouses and seedy factory dwellings, where any half-wit could lose himself, even with a pack of bloodhounds on his tail. There were no gas lamps on those streets.

That will do.

I ran and jumped, rolled and ran again, then slid the length of a downspout and was across the road before the man with the crowbar knew I was there. I bolted down the side of the deserted fish market and scaled the iron rungs set into the back wall. In seconds, I was across the roof and clambering out over the scaffolding of the theater.

Fevel was still coming, but I had pulled away from him during that last transition. If I could make it over the pub’s fire escape before he had me in sight, I was home free.

Well, not home free, but not dead or dragged back to Morlak, which amounted to the same thing.

My heart was thumping with the exertion of the chase, but I was in my element up here, scrambling, swinging, gripping, and hoisting over iron and brick and stone. And though a mistake might send me to my death, I felt strangely composed, far more than I would have been on the ground. My conscious mind was silent now as other parts of me—arms and legs, fingers and the toes in my boots—took over. I focused on each step, each handhold, each shift of weight, so that the whole escape felt choreographed.

Just the leap from the fire escape to the painted iron girders of the railway bridge to go.

If challenged to attempt it any other night, I might have hesitated. Fatally.

A. J. Hartley's Books