Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(24)

I woke with a start, and the first thought in my head was that today I was supposed to collect Rahvey’s baby. I reached for the familiar softness of the habbit and pressed it to my throat as if trying to stanch a wound.

*

THE SUN WAS NOT yet up, and the night had turned genuinely cold. I was thirsty, but Willinghouse’s goat curry was the best meal I had had in months and would sustain me a while longer. I performed the Kathahry in the dusty stone chamber, moving from pose to graceful pose of the balance and agility exercises. They were once a Lani ritual, part martial art, part religious observance, but few people did them now, and I had kept them up only because as a steeplejack, my life had depended on strength and flexibility. Vestris taught me. Rahvey sometimes copied us, but halfheartedly and only because she didn’t like being left out. It was one of the things—like reading—that I had felt privileged to share with my beautiful eldest sister.

Long ago.

By the time I was done, the sun was rising over the bay, and Bar-Selehm’s ragged industrial skyline was momentarily beautiful again. In an hour, as the day warmed fast, the streets would throng with people, and the Martel Court would be teeming with the anxious and desperate, watched over by dragoons and suited men with sheaves of papers bound with ribbon. It was time to move, but not to Rahvey’s house. Not yet. I had said I would take the child today, but I had not said when, and there were other things I had to do.

I bought a newspaper at the stand on Winckley Street, enjoying the disbelief in the girl’s eyes when I put a silver sixpence on the counter and asked if she could make change.

“There’s nothing about the boy,” she said, watching the way my eyes raked the front page. “The one who fell.”

I nodded but didn’t speak.

I scaled the water tower on the corner of Old Town, using a combination of access ladder and downspout to reach the roof. Watched by a pair of iridescent bee-eaters, I read the newspapers cover to cover as the light hardened and the temperature rose.

There was no news about the Beacon, although—along with a story about potential land deals between white investors and the unassimilated Mahweni, with the tribal protests that always happened as a result—it still dominated the headlines. The coverage had moved to rabble-rousing. Why had there been no arrests? If the Beacon was still in the city, why had it not been seen? If it wasn’t in the city, where was it and how had it been moved? The Parliament had planned a special session to debate the matter, but wasn’t that merely a distraction from the lack of progress?

Colonel Archibald Mandel, Secretary of Trade, had made a speech requesting an immediate ban on the sale of luxorite, not just in the city, but nationally and internationally as well. This measure would prevent the Beacon from being broken up and entering the legitimate market. Those whose livelihood depended on the trade had responded angrily, saying that the government should be looking more closely at some of those foreign powers who had no luxorite of their own, particularly the Grappoli.

It was always the Grappoli, our neighbors to the northwest, whose troops, if the papers were to be believed, had been poised to cross vast tracts of bush to lay their hands on Bar-Selehm for close to a hundred years.

The family of Mr. Ansveld, the luxorite trader who had been found dead, issued a statement saying that they had no knowledge of why the “beloved family man” would have taken his own life, and they requested that journalists leave them to their grief in private. A neighbor reported Mr. Ansveld’s son saying that had the conditions not made the suicide verdict undeniable, he would not have believed it.

I scowled and rubbed the back of my neck, which had started to burn, then flipped through the large tissuelike pages until I found the continuation of the story.

“Mr. Ansveld’s body,” I read,

was found at 8:47 on the morning of the sixteenth by the building’s custodian in the company of Messrs. Jacoby Smithe (Under Secretary of Trade) and Hanson Boothes (of the Luxorite Commission), who were scheduled to meet with Mr. Ansveld that morning. The fourth-story room—which is windowless—was locked and bolted from the inside, and tools had to be brought up from stores to effect entry. Mr. Ansveld appeared to have cut his own throat with a razor that was found at the scene.

I rubbed the back of my neck again, but did not move into the shade of the hatch. I combed through the rest of the paper, scanning the pages until I found a grainy halftone picture: a group of stuffy-looking white men in high-collared shirts and sober suits facing unsmilingly forward. The caption called them the Shadow Committee of Trade and Industry. Second and third from the left were two familiar faces, considerably younger than the others, one of them badly scarred: Mr. Josiah Willinghouse and Mr. Stefan Von Strahden.

Shadow Committee.

So my would-be employer had told a half truth. He was who he said he was, but he did not, strictly speaking, work for the government. He was a member of the opposition, the party not currently in power. Yes, he would work on bipartisan projects and initiatives with the current administration, but he was not in a position to make law, determine funding for state projects, or any of the other prerogatives of the ruling party.

A slip of the tongue? I wondered. A minor embroidery designed to impress? Or a calculated misdirection?

If it was the latter, it had been a foolish one if it could be dashed by reading a newspaper. Still, it gave me pause, and I felt a tiny disappointment that the circles in which I was moving—albeit secretly—were not quite so elevated as I had thought. It was, I knew, a stupid response, perhaps even a dangerous one, and I found myself thinking about that phrase of his about the troubling occurrences that might overwhelm us all.