Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(6)

“Special,” he said, uncertain.

“Exactly.”

And I felt what I always felt when I thought of Vestris: a kind of vague privilege that I knew her. It was like sitting in a shaft of sunlight on a cool day, a private warming glow that made me the envy of everyone around me.

“One time when we were little,” I said, “the mine where Papa worked had been closed, and he had no work, which meant we had no money. Vestris brought food home every night. Rahvey asked her how she was paying for it, and you know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said, ‘I just ask nicely. I explain that my sisters are hungry, and people give me food.’”

“So she was begging.”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t like that. She’s just the kind of person people want to please. I can’t explain it.”

Tanish looked at me for more, but I said nothing.

The city was walled, and though urban sprawl had long since outgrown the old fortifications, the walls still marked the limits of Bar-Selehm proper and they were routinely patrolled. It was clear as we approached the West Gate, however, that something different was going on this morning. One of the ancient iron-bound doors had actually been closed—the first time since the city had quarantined itself during a cattle death outbreak three years ago—and people were being funneled through a gamut of dragoons. The soldiers wore their scarlet jackets and feathered helmets in spite of the mounting heat, and they carried rifles with sword bayonets. Two were mounted on striped orleks—local, zebralike horses—which stamped and tossed their heads restlessly. The troops on the ground were white, but there were members of one of the black regiments up on the walls.

This too was about the Beacon. Not Berrit.

The soldiers checked papers, but the only people they detained were those carrying bags, baskets, or crates. Me and Tanish they practically ignored, though I flinched away when one of the orleks stooped toward me, its nostrils flaring. I’m a city girl, and am not good around large animals. Once through the checkpoint, I increased my pace till Tanish was almost running to keep up.

The residential streets of the Drowning had no official names and did not appear on any map, rather coming and going from season to season as the river dwindled and flooded, shifting its course and turning what had been a bustling tent city to marshland. There were no sewer lines but the river in the Drowning. The street corners sprouted ragged produce stands, huddles of itinerant laborers hoping to be hired for a few hours, and makeshift barbecues fashioned from scrap metal and fueled by homemade charcoal. This was where I had grown up. The hut in which I was born had long since turned to firewood, and no one could remember exactly where it had stood, but this was, I supposed, home.

Once. When Papa was still alive.

The Drowning smelled different from the industrial heart of the city where I lived now, a sour smell of bodies and animals and rotting vegetables. I preferred the bitter tang of the chimneys, even if it left me hacking till my throat burned, and coated my face and arms with soot. The Drowning stank of poverty, ignorance, and despair.

I hated it.

The Lani aren’t indigenous to the region. We were brought here almost three hundred years ago from lands to the east by the whites from the north. My ancestors came as indentured servants, manual laborers and field hands, living separate from both the indigenous Mahweni and the whites. They were never slaves and believed they had settled in Feldesland by choice, keeping to themselves as the northerners conquered, bought, and absorbed more and more of the land from the native blacks. The Lani were neither military nor political, and reasoned that as long as they were left to their own devices, they were better staying out of the disputes and skirmishes during the white settlement of the region. By the time they looked up from their cooking fires to find that they had turned into a squalid and itinerant people living peasant lives, it was too late.

Most of Morlak’s gang came from here or somewhere similarly ragged and decaying. Some of them, like Tanish, still thought of this place as home, and his mood brightened as we reached the first outlying huts and tents.

“I see Mrs. Emtiga’s ass got out again,” he said, amused. “That thing needs an armed guard and a castle wall.”

I laughed, then risked a question. “Berrit was a Drowning boy too, right? You must have been almost the same age.”

A Drowning boy. That’s what they called them, proudly and with no sense of the bitter irony.

Tanish didn’t look at me. “I didn’t remember him till we spoke a few days ago,” he said. “But, yes. I think we played together when we were little. Then he went to the Westside gang and I stayed here till…”

Till Tanish’s mother died.

“Why did he leave Westside?” I went on quickly.

“Got traded,” said Tanish. “Part of a deal involving the Dock Street warehouse and some building supplies.”

So Morlak bought him. That wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did.

“How did he feel about that?” I asked.

Tanish shrugged. “Didn’t seem to care,” he said. “Said he was going to be something big in the Seventh Street gang.”

“He’d been a steeplejack for the Westside boys?”

“Nah,” said Tanish. “He said he’d been a pickpocket, but I think he was really a bootblack. Might have done a bit of thieving on the side, but that wasn’t how he earned his keep. He’d never been up a chimney, inside or out. He pretended not to be, but I think he was scared of heights.”