Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(18)
Not tonight.
I touched the two-headed coin around my neck, then broke into a sprint along the gantry of the staircase. At the end, I planted my hands on the rail and vaulted into nothing, turning slowly in space so that for a moment I looked bound to land in a bloody heap in the street, and then I was grasping the metal of the bridge and swinging gracefully up.
I knew before I dropped into the sparrow islands that I had shed my pursuers.
Which is why it was doubly alarming to round the corner, smiling to myself, only to have two white men step out of the shadows before I had even seen them. I feinted right, but one of them deftly seized my wrist, twisted it up between my shoulder blades, and pinned me face forward against the wall.
“Miss Sutonga,” said the other in Feldish, the man in the linen suit who had been watching me earlier. “What an exciting life you lead! We’d be obliged, however,” he added with polite formality, “if you abandoned your plans for the rest of the evening and came with us.”
CHAPTER
7
THE MAN IN THE linen suit blew a shrill whistle, and moments later a black carriage appeared, driven by a man in a top hat. He did not look at me or the two men as they bundled me inside.
They were both big men, but they moved with studied efficiency. One of them—the one in the linen suit—had a long pistol with a flared barrel, the other a slender but heavy-looking truncheon, though neither had felt the need to brandish their weapons when apprehending me. They did not wear uniforms or any kind of insignia, but they were not Morlak’s men.
“There, now,” said the one with the pistol once the carriage rolled off. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” He smiled, but his eyes held mine with a chill frankness that kept me in place better than his comrade’s vise grip on my arm.
While I had been oddly composed when running from the gang on the rooftops, these two, with their quiet professionalism, scared me. What would happen next, who they were, or what they wanted with me, I had no idea.
My eyes flashed to the door handle.
The man with the revolver inclined his head. In a voice as impassive as his face, he said, “Let’s not make things more difficult than they need to be, shall we, Miss Sutonga?”
“How do you know my name?” I asked as the carriage slowed, then turned and resumed its former rattling pace.
“All that will become clear,” said the man evenly.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Neither man responded, watching me now as if I had not spoken at all. I had no choice but to sit and wait.
I wasn’t sure how long we drove. Ten minutes? Twenty? Once a woman laughed—a high keening that sounded like a shout of pain until the end—and once I thought I heard the driver talking as the carriage stopped, but none of it gave me a sense of where we were. I used my free hand to release my hair and tipped my head forward so that it fell about my face like a veil.
When we finally stopped, the one with the truncheon produced from his pocket a black velvet bag with a drawstring. “Put this on, please,” he said, tossing it to me.
I looked at it, feeling stupid and afraid. “Put it on?” I echoed.
“Over your head,” said the man with the truncheon. “It’s a blindfold.”
I hesitated, suddenly so frightened that I could barely move.
“Put it on,” said the man, his voice still low and uninflected. “Or we will put it on for you.” He said it matter-of-factly. If there was any emotion beneath the words it was boredom, and somehow this scared me more than if he had threatened.
I pulled the bag over my head and lost the world entirely.
In the confusion that followed, I was manhandled firmly but without obvious cruelty out into the night, then into somewhere more confined, where the soles of my boots rang on hard floors. My hands were held behind my back, but I was not bound, and I was guided expertly, so that only once did I jar my shoulder against a doorjamb as I was steered through. Then I was pushed into a chair and released. I snatched the blindfold from my head as the door behind me closed heavily, and I heard it lock as I swiveled to see if I was alone.
I was.
The room was unlike anywhere I had ever been, and I rose from the chair with a new sense of strangeness. It was pristine, the floor matted with expensive grass braid, the furnishings fashioned from lustrous, striped timber. Most of the decoration was elegantly northern, and the books that lined the walls were in Feldish, but there were tribal masks in red and black that looked Mahweni, and there was a statue of an elephant god in black stone. There were Lani paintings on the wall, showing the story of the young god Semtaleen, who stole light from the stars to bring fire to man—as Papa had told me when I was very young.
A candelabrum suspended from a plaster rose in the center of the ceiling was lit by a dozen tiny glass globes. I stared, barely able to believe it: Each globe contained a grain of luxorite. The light was clear and strong and only very slightly yellow. It would take a Lani day laborer the better part of a year to earn enough to purchase one of those little lights.
There were two doors into the room, but the only windows were set near the high ceiling and showed only the night sky. I would need to stack at least one chair onto the desk to reach the ledge. I moved to it and took hold of its exquisitely inlaid top, hoping to drag it under the window, but it was too heavy. I was around the other side, bent at the waist, and pushing when I heard the door behind me click open.