Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(57)

Morlak hobbling on his stick.

Or Mnenga with his spear?

The thought horrified me, but would not go away. I had seen the Mahweni boy only a few blocks away, in a place he should not be, and armed.…

I spun around, trying to locate the source of the sound in the eerie glow of the gaslit fog, and as I did so, I snatched the heavy pistol from my belt and pointed it into the shadows.

Another careful footstep.

“Who’s there?” I demanded. “Step into the light. I’m armed!”

Silence. Then the distinctive ring of steel: a long knife or sword sliding from its sheath.

I cocked the gun’s hammer and aimed the long barrel into the gently swirling mist, but there was nothing to see. How close might he get before presenting me with a target? Ten yards? Five? The fog seemed to confuse the sound so that I wasn’t sure which way I was facing, and when a distant train blew its whistle, the sound seemed to bounce from all directions.

My gun hand trembled. I had just enough presence of mind not to shoot blindly. Some of the buildings around me were residences. A stray bullet could go through a window.…

I pointed the revolver’s barrel into a patch of exposed dirt where a fractured flagstone had been removed, and fired once.

In the silence, the sound was a cannon blast, and its reverberation slapped around the facades of the square like thunder. My ears rang, and for a moment the world seemed muffled. I heard a window open somewhere to my left, and then the distant but unmistakable shriek of a police whistle.

From my attacker, the man I assumed had already killed Billy before turning his attention on me, there was no sound.

Then there were footsteps again, coming toward me. I turned, seized the lowest bar of the scaffolding, which crisscrossed its uneven way up the column to the bronze pirate on the top, and began to climb, my hair swinging in my face. The pistol was still in my hand, but the last I saw before the fog swallowed the ground beneath me was the shape of a man moving to Billy’s body, hesitating, and looking around as the shrill blast of the police whistle sounded once more.

I could not see who it was.

I climbed higher, faster, hoping against hope that I would not be trapped at the top of the column. The earth fell away beneath me. The fog swallowed me up. And still I climbed. At the top, a set of four gas lamps gave a faint opalescent aura to the bronze figure, but the column itself was utterly dark, so that the statue seemed to float like a specter above the city. It was not till I reached the top that I found what I had hoped for: a slim and rickety bridge made of ladders and cable, which the cleaning crew used to bring supplies from the roof of a nearby building.

It sloped downward, creaking when I put my feet on it, and it had never been designed to be used in the dark, but I could hear voices below, muffled by the fog. The police? Billy’s killer? Perhaps both. I took my first unsteady step onto the slim bridge and felt it wobble under my weight.

There was a single cable at waist height, which served as a handrail, on the right. There should have been one on the left too, but it was missing. I pocketed the gun, gripped the cable with one hand, and holding the other out for balance, pressed on, eyes front, feeling my way with the soles of my boots. The fog was too dense to see where the bridge ended.

The voices from the square were louder now but less distinct, and for a moment everything seemed to fall away, even my horror of Billy’s death, so that it was just me up there in the night sky, trusting to hands and feet and instinct.

Below me, someone screamed. It was a strange, disembodied sound, and for a split second, I wondered if it was me, if the feelings I kept locked behind the dam had somehow broken out without me realizing.…

The bridge ended on the ornamental roof of an office building. I used a discarded ladder to cross onto the Merchant Marine headquarters next door, and then dropped onto the fire escape of the Dragon’s Head. I covered the next block and a half on rooftops and one decorative ledge, reaching the League of Magistrates’ chambers, and finally the south entrance to the Martel Court.

I scaled the clock tower as quickly as I could, shut myself in, and rushed to the child I had left there. The only good thing about the night was that she had not been with me, and the idea that being near me was likely to get her killed settled in my gut like a stone.

The baby was sleeping soundly. The strangeness of her peace after what had happened first shocked, then calmed me, and I lay with her, feeling her breathing, her heart, as I stared wide eyed into the blackness, the habbit clutched tight in my hands. Her safety was, I saw now, an illusion—something I had wanted to believe in but which was clearly impossible to achieve. I could maintain the pretense no longer.

*

I MOVED BEFORE DAWN, giving Captain Franzen’s square a wide berth and reaching the orphanage called Pancaris, the place I had vowed never to revisit, just as the city came to life. I laid the basket on the steps. In it, the girl I called Kalla slept. The nuns would give her a new name, I thought, as I rapped hard with the knocker three times, walking quickly away before the door opened. If I saw her again years from now, I could be introduced to her and still not know her. She would, of course, not know me either.

The morning breeze chilled my tear-streaked face, but no one pointed or shouted or seemed to see me at all, in spite of the guilt and failure, the terrible, exquisite sadness that seemed to burn in my heart like the lost Beacon.

It was the only choice, I told myself over and over as I walked, but though I believed it, the mantra did not help at all.