Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(32)

“Wasn’t gonna give you any,” he said. He held up first one purse, then the other. “This one,” he said, “this is for work. Some of it is, you might say, of questionable origins. This one, though—this one is strictly on the up-and-up. All hard earned and legal-like.”

“Why keep them separate?” I asked.

“This one,” he said shyly, holding the one he’d said was legit, “that’s for the ring I’m saving for. My Bessie will be touched by nothing what isn’t pure.”

I grinned at his earnestness and he blushed.

“Fair enough, lover boy,” I said. “Ask your scullery princess what people are saying about the death of Mr. Ansveld.” His eyes widened with recognition. “Discreetly,” I added. “And keep me out of it.”

“Or what?” he said, a little of his former defiance returning.

“Scullery maid for an upmarket merchant, eh?” I said. “And you all honorable and respectable. She might not like to hear that her beau once got his arm broken for trying to sell a pocket watch to the brother of the man he nicked it from the day before.”

Billy was famously incompetent. “He didn’t break my arm,” he sputtered, but the bluster was empty. “Fine,” he added. “I’ll be discreet.”

I gave him a friendly pat on the cheek, and he flinched as if I were going to hit him.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said, checking the clock on the bank across the street. I had to collect the baby and attend a funeral.





CHAPTER

12

BERRIT’S FUNERAL TOOK PLACE at the Lani monkey temple. Anything not wholly burned in the pyre would go into the river—which was once deemed holy—where the crocodiles would take it. Tanish and I had met just outside the West Gate and he had stared openmouthed at the baby while I looked around to make sure none of the other gang members had followed him.

“How long will you keep it?” he asked, frightened for the child and for me.

“Not long,” I said, as if I knew some easy, obvious solution that hadn’t yet occurred to him. “Does Morlak know where you are?”

“Too busy shouting at people to ask,” said Tanish. “And he can’t really walk. Moves like a badly made puppet.”

He launched into an exaggerated imitation, limping and moaning and cursing my name, so that I laughed for real.

He gave me an uneasy look. “You should get away,” Tanish offered.

He said it reluctantly, sadly, knowing he should do so for my sake, but not wanting me to follow the advice. I grinned and ruffled his hair till he pulled free, avoiding my eyes, and skipped away, whooping. The boys in the gang all talked and smoked and drank like adults, coarse and callous, their eyes hard as their hands. But in moments like this, it was like pulling the night shroud from a luxorite lamp, all the boyish rapture he usually kept so carefully locked away bursting out and splashing the world with light.

“Can’t catch me, I’m a hummingbird!” he announced, dancing in close, his little hands fluttering on crooked arms, then hopping back and away.

“Here, hummingbird,” I said, fishing a piece of succulent spine fruit from my satchel. “Nectar.”

He came weaving in again, his hands flickering fast as they could go, and dipped his face to the fruit. He took a bite, still “hovering,” and came up with juice running down his chin so that he laughed out loud even as I rapped him on the head with the rolled-up newspaper I was still carrying. For a moment, brief and vibrant and glorious, we forgot we were going to a funeral.

It was clear as Tanish and I drew near the twilit buildings that the service had already begun. I saw torchlight and wondered if the murmur of voices in chanting chorus would wake the swaddled baby asleep in my satchel.

We slipped quietly into the assembly, the hood of my black shirt pulled low over my face. For once my monochromatic wardrobe didn’t make me stand out in the Drowning. The huddle of Lani friends, family, and community leaders—including Florihn, the midwife—had put aside their usual riot of colors and looked like a roost of crows. Berrit’s hawkish grandmother sat at the front, her face blank save when she fiddled irritably with the mourning veil draped around her shoulders.

She was facing a stack of brushwood doused with oil. A plain pine coffin was wedged into the dry branches, and I watched as the priest’s assistant—clad in gray and wearing a chain of bright metal—nudged it gingerly to make sure it wouldn’t slide out once the fire took hold. I checked that the sun-disk pendant was under my shirt. I had decided to keep it on me rather than give it to his grandmother and was wearing it on the same chain as the double-headed coin.

She would only sell it, I told myself. Someone should keep it for Berrit’s sake.

I saw the feathered top hat of Deveril, flanked by a couple of boys from the Westside gang. He looked solemn, and I held my head up long enough for him to catch my eye so that I could give him a nod of acknowledgment. Apart from me and Tanish, no one from the Seventh Street gang had bothered to come, and I found myself wondering again how Berrit could have thought that his move from Westside was a good thing.

Friends in high places …

There was, at least, no sign of Morlak. I didn’t need telling that he had made a faster and more complete recovery than Tanish had expected or that he was stepping up his attempts to find me. I wouldn’t be safe till …