Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(38)

“I cannot feed her,” I said. “I have to wait for her mother.”

He looked at me, and his smile was grim, understanding, but when he reached for the basket, probing with one finger as if he was going to give it to the child to suck, I felt a sudden panic and flinched, half reaching to stop him.

He froze, looking at me, then withdrew his hand, nodding again. “I should go,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “It’s just…” But I could not explain because I did not understand myself. Instead I just said, “Please tell no one.”

He inclined his head seriously, then stood up, but he did not walk away. “You will be here again? Tomorrow, perhaps?”

“I … I don’t know,” I said, my former anxieties crouching hyena-like in the dark places of my head. “I suppose. I have to bring the child back to be fed.”

He seemed to sense my mood, and his smile was tempered with something like concern.

“Bye,” I said before he could add anything that might embarrass me further.

He began his bow, and I turned away. When I looked round again, he was gone.

*

I PICKED MY WAY to the city gates, endured the contempt of the guards when they saw the sleeping bundle in my satchel, and made my way toward Old Town, glad of the firm sidewalk and gas lamps after the darkness and rutted tracks of the Drowning. I could smell the ocean now, a clear, salt tang unlike the stagnant sourness of the river edge near Rahvey’s hut. Down by the water a few blocks away stood the pillar surmounted by the bronze of Captain Franzen. Tanish would be arriving to start work within the hour. I needed to see someone who would smile at me, someone who would tell me that taking Rahvey’s child had been the right thing to do.

Because it didn’t feel like the right thing. It felt stupid. I felt stupid, and the fact that I was responding to the Lani way that was at least as stupid, maybe more so, didn’t help at all. So I walked with the sleeping child slung against my chest, eyes on the ground, lost in misery and humiliation, and I didn’t see Morlak in the alley. I saw nothing till he lunged out at me, knife in one hand, the other grasping my hair, and everything went out of my head save one shrill, terrified thought:

The baby. Oh gods, the baby.





CHAPTER

14

I COULD NOT FIGHT back. My right arm flung out for balance as he pulled me into the alley, while my left clamped protectively over the satchel. He assumed I was going for a weapon—the dog I had stabbed him with before—and his knife went to my throat. I splayed my fingers in surrender and gave in as he yanked my hair, spun me around, and thrust me up against the wall.

My head hit the brick, but the pain was nothing to the panic, the dread.

Not the baby, I thought again. Gods, not the baby.

The thought shrieked through my raging, thumping heart, my shallow, ragged breathing.

“Put the bag down,” he snarled into my ear. He smelled of stale sweat and madness that had once been hate. “Came to see the boy, huh, little Anglet? So predictable.”

I hesitated and he pressed the knife once more, so that I craned my neck up like a giraffe. Then, very carefully, I began to lift the satchel strap over my head with my left hand. I could feel the weight of the baby within, could almost hear her breathing, and in my mind, I saw what would happen next: The bag would reach the pavement and, assuming my tools were in it, he would kick it away.…

I froze, overcome with a new and desperate horror.

“I said, put it down!” he spat, teeth bared.

I extended my arm as far as I could and slowly, carefully set the satchel on the ground, shrinking away from it as best I could inside his savage grip. His breath was sour, and his lank, greasy hair trailed into my face.

“Take whatever you want!” I gasped.

“All in good time,” he muttered, and his grin was dirty, cruel.

He was going to kill me. I knew it as sure as I knew the sun would rise. He would do what he wanted with me, and then he would cut my throat. Nothing else was worth the risk.

“Just don’t touch the bag,” I said. It wasn’t really a plea, and it certainly wasn’t a trick. It just came out.

His brow furrowed. Skeptical ideas chased themselves through his eyes, which flashed momentarily to the discarded satchel. He kneed me hard in the stomach, and I doubled over, wheezing.

“How stupid do you think I am?” he rasped. “We will not be making any deals. There is nothing you have that I can’t take for myself, and you have nothing worth having anyway. You have nothing, you are nothing, and that is what I’m going to teach you before you die.”

I kept very still. His hand was not on my mouth, but if I cried out for help, he would stab me where I stood, and there was no one to hear anyway—not here, not now.

And then, with the softest of sounds, and just as it had done when I was sitting by the fire with the Mahweni boy, the satchel moved.

If he had been looking directly at it, he might have been less surprised, but he caught the shifting of the fabric out of the corner of his eye and jumped. For the briefest of seconds, his knife hand was forgotten. I was forgotten.

I was still half doubled over, my head level with his stomach, with the bandaged hole in his side. I butted the spot hard as I could and he staggered back in pain, releasing my hand. I stepped between him and the satchel and, as he raised his hands to grapple, went low. I kicked him in the groin, then scythed at his left leg, catching him hard on the knee.