Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(7)

“So why did he think he was going to be big in the gang?”

“Optimist,” said Tanish bleakly. “Always going on about what he was going to do when his ship came in.”

I nodded thoughtfully, and as Tanish’s face tightened with the memory, I decided to switch direction. “What about you?” I asked, ruffling his hair affectionately. “What will you do when your ship comes in?”

“Ships don’t come in for the likes of us,” he said.

“Sure they do,” I tried, not believing it.

“Then they’ll be rusted-up pieces of kanti,” he said.

I laughed. “Full of rats,” I agreed.

“And holes,” he added. “And sharks would swim in through the holes and live in the hold, ready to bite your legs off as soon as you went aboard.” He grinned at the idea, and that, for the moment, was as good as things were going to get.

Inside the tent city, a gaggle of local women and their kids had already gathered outside the hut. There was a sense of drama brewing in the air, and they paused in their chatter as we approached, nodding at me with caution and watchfulness. Sinchon’s look as I opened the hut’s juddering door was, however, loaded with accusation.

No surprise there.

Sinchon shared his wife’s disdain for his antisocial sister-in-law. He was a hoglike man who scratched a living panning for luxorite in the river above the Drowning. He had found a couple of grains five years ago, but nothing since, and lived mainly off the scraps of minerals he turned up from time to time. The kids laughed at him because everyone knew there was no luxorite being found anymore, but he still thought I was beneath him.

“Where have you been?” he shot, pausing in the whittling of a stick. “The baby is almost here.”

“I’m here now,” I said.

“Your sister needed you earlier.”

“I was working,” I replied, avoiding his eyes.

And Rahvey hasn’t needed me a day in her life, I added to myself.

“Who’s that?” he asked, gazing past me to where Tanish was loitering on the steps.

“Someone I work with. Used to live here. He’ll help you get some water.”

There was a snatch of conversation from the room beyond the thin lattice door, a woman’s voice. Sinchon looked at the door but did not move. Lani men didn’t go into the delivery room until it was over.

“Hope to the gods it’s not a girl,” he said as I crossed the room.

I said nothing, but I felt the chill grip of the idea inside my chest. Rahvey had had a son who she lost to the damp lung when he was two. She had three girls already. She would not be allowed a fourth.

They dressed it up in other words, but the bald truth was that Lani girls were not considered worth raising. They were married off—expensively—as soon as possible, but the problem wasn’t really about cost. Lani culture was made by men. They were the leaders, the lawmakers, the property holders. Women raised the children, cooked, cleaned, and did as they were told. If they worked outside the home, they were paid less than men for the same job by their Lani bosses, and working for anyone else meant turning your back on your people. Though Morlak and most of his gang were Lani, the mere fact of working in the city proper meant that to most of the people I had grown up with, I had abandoned them. At their best, girls were pretty things used to ally families. At their worst, an annoyance.

Poverty and ignorance have a way of clinging to bad ideas. The worst among what were sanctimoniously clustered as “the Lani way” was the rule that said that no family could have more than three daughters. The first daughter, it was said, was a blessing. The second, a trial. The third, a curse. As a third daughter myself, I felt the full weight of that last piece of wisdom, which was why I spent as little time among “my people” as possible. Rahvey had three girls already. If she gave birth to another, the child would be sent to an orphanage. In the old days, if no suitable mother could be found, more drastic steps would be taken—a grim little secret the appalled white settlers had made illegal. Such practices had, supposedly, ended, but there were accidents during the birthing of unwanted daughters, which people did not scrutinize too closely.

“Is it true, what they are saying?” Sinchon asked, his hand on the door handle.

“About what?” I replied, thinking of Berrit.

“The Beacon,” said Sinchon. His usually impassive face looked uncertain, hunted. “We can’t see it. They are saying someone stole it.”

I frowned, feeling again that sense that the earth had wobbled beneath my feet. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Isn’t that where you work?” he demanded, masking his unease with a contempt with which he was more comfortable.

“It’s not there,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to it, but it’s gone.”

Sinchon’s face set, but he said no more and left.

The inner room was just big enough for a bed and a stove, and the latter had been loaded with coal. It was stiflingly hot, and the air was vinegar sour with sweat. The midwife, kneeling between Rahvey’s splayed legs, shot me a look as I came in and snapped, “Close the door! You’re letting the cold in.”

There was no cold, but I did as she asked.

At the head of the bed, Rahvey looked surprisingly placid, but when her eyes flicked to mine, her face fell instantly.