Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(35)

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RAHVEY, AS IF TO make a point, refused to take the baby with her. I looked for Tanish, but he had slipped away before the funeral ended. I did not know when I would see him again. The thought pained me.

One by one, people drifted away, and the sun vanished beneath the silhouettes of distant towers and chimneys that were the city proper, until the only light remaining in the old temple came from the embers of the two fires. A few days ago I would have been able to see the Beacon like a star riding low over the city.

Strange.

If the government couldn’t recover it they would probably put a gas lamp in its place, which wouldn’t be the same at all. Without the Beacon, I felt more than usually lost, stuck in this remnant of my past like a character in a discarded book, unable to move any further through the story. I wandered around the temple, cradling the baby, and found a newly carved statue of Cenu, the Lani goddess of prosperity. It had been cut from soft wood and had yet to be painted, but I knew exactly what it would look like when it was done because I had been looking at this image all my life: it would be brightly colored, an overflowing basket of yellow wheat on one arm, an infant in the other, and the woman herself—ample breasted and broad hipped—would have her head tipped slightly to one side, beaming stupidly at the world. The expression gave her the look of someone who had been smoking servitt through a water pipe, but she hadn’t been, because only the men of the village did that. She was drunk on her own beauty, on her usefulness to her family, on the Lani way.

I felt the rising red tide I had managed to suppress as it burst the hinges of one of the doors in my heart. All the injustice and frustration I had been wrestling with streamed out like a jet of molten steel. I seized a rock and smashed it into the statue’s saintly face over and over till its features splintered into nothing.





CHAPTER

13

THE CHICKEN WAS CHARRED on the outside but sweet and tender within. I had eaten nothing so good since Willinghouse’s goat curry, and I devoured it hungrily, the pleasurable relief of it momentarily quelling all my other frustrations and anxieties. I was still in the temple grounds, sitting close to the barbecue hearth, watching the dwindling flames as they shifted from orange and yellow to blue and green. I had moved away from the defaced statue of Cenu, feeling so stupid and ashamed that I left a few coins at its feet: more than enough to repay the carver for the work he would have to do over. Vestris’s coin I kept like a talisman.

Down by the river a male hippo bellowed in the dark, and the females of the pod answered in turn. They wouldn’t come up into the temple grounds, but I would need to be careful when I returned to the Drowning in case they had left the water to browse. Their teeth were a foot and a half long and the power of their jaws could break a crocodile in half.… I touched the sleeping child and it stirred, animal-like, without waking, so that I smiled. I had spent so much time wondering about the baby’s fragility that I had not allowed myself to register how beautiful she was, how much a thoughtless part of me was glad to be close to her.

Was this how Papa had looked at me, with the same wondering joy? Or had he seen in me the death of his wife? If ever the latter, he got past it or concealed it utterly, and I was grateful for that. Deliberate or otherwise, it was an act of love. I wondered if Berrit had experienced anything similar, or if his hawkish, grasping grandmother had set the tone for the whole family.

I could make no sense of Berrit’s death. Why had Ansveld been to see the boy? If the luxorite dealer had wanted to steal the Beacon, it made a kind of sense that he would contract with steeplejacks, but Berrit just didn’t have the skills. The boy could have been part of a team, but if so, why was he the only one to die, and who had killed him? Ansveld was unlikely to have been the one hanging from a brace on the chimney ledge, assuming he had still been alive at that point.

It had to involve Morlak. He would have been the go-between, the agent and manager, though I felt sure I would have heard if the gang leader had ever been seen with a gentleman as elevated as Ansveld. They could have met secretly, of course, but Ansveld had taken a rickshaw into the Drowning: not the action of a man who was trying to be inconspicuous.

Something wasn’t right.

I wished I could sit down with Willinghouse and talk it through, but as soon as I thought of it, the memory of the pale man with the scar and the fierce green eyes unsettled me. I was no Vestris, shaking the shanty’s mud from her immaculate sandals as she made her escape—confident, exquisite, free of the place where she had grown up. She probably spent her life at balls and soirees, exchanging easy banter with the likes of Willinghouse, meeting those piercing eyes of his and holding them, confident, like an equal.…

I would write to her in the morning. She would know what to do. Maybe I could learn something from her about how to deal with men like Willinghouse.

Meaning how to impress them? said an insidious voice in my head.

No. That was stupid.

I thrust a branch into the heart of the fire. The remaining wood flared and spat sparks into the night. In the flickering light, something in the underbrush to my left shifted.

I froze.

Hyena, I thought, getting quickly to my feet and edging even closer to the remains of the fire and the satchel where the baby slept. Once when I was a child and the summer had been particularly dry, a rogue hyena entered a hut on the edge of the Drowning where a mother and her three children slept—