Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(79)

His voice had swelled and his face darkened as he spoke, but now he breathed again, shrugging off his stately passion. When he smiled, he seemed ordinary.

“This has been most helpful to me and to the Mahweni Nation,” he said. “I am in your debt, Corporal.” He took the younger man’s hand once more, clasped it, then made a fractional turn, which presented Emtezu with the door.

“And there is nothing else I can do, Excellency?” he asked.

“Nothing at all,” said Sohwetti genially. “I will see that my carriage gets you back into the city.”

Emtezu bowed, took a step toward the door, then glanced back to where I had begun to get to my feet.

“But Miss Sutonga has not enjoyed my hospitality before,” said Sohwetti. “She should stay here awhile.”

“I need to get back to work,” I said.

“Nonsense.” Sohwetti smiled, flicking the notion away with his fly stick. “I won’t hear of it. I will treat you to a true Mahweni banquet. You have never had the like, I guarantee it. I will show you the estate personally and see to it that you get back home safely this evening.”

I hesitated. Emtezu was lingering in the doorway, one hand on the knob, looking back at me unreadably.

“I really can’t stay, Your Excellency,” I said, trying for politeness. “My employers will be worried.”

“I will send word of your whereabouts to assuage their anxieties,” he said, magnanimous in his certainty. “I would take it as an affront if you were to decline.” He made a mock show of offense, though the smile crept back into place like a jackal stealing into an untended kitchen.

I gave Emtezu a last, uncertain look, but knew he could do nothing without upsetting the great man for no real reason. A moment later, he was bowing his way out, leaving me alone with Sohwetti.

“Sit,” he said, doing so himself. He said it almost casually, but the smile was gone. He took a long breath and reached for a silver box on the desk beside him. He opened it, took something, and pushed the box toward me.

“Help yourself,” he said. “Dried cadmium grapes. Sweet and tart. They are a small addiction of mine. Quite harmless, I believe, but it bothers me nonetheless, feeling like a slave to my body’s cravings. Do you ever feel that, Miss Sutonga, that you are not completely in control of your own life?”

“I’ve never felt otherwise,” I said.

He nodded thoughtfully. “I used to feel that way,” he said, as if we were old friends at the end of a long evening’s catching up. “Long ago. I used to feel powerless in the face of all I could not do because the world had taken from me what should have been mine. And not just mine. My whole people’s. Robbed by diplomats whose friends had better weapons.”

He smiled again as broad as before, but bleak now. He chewed one of the dried grapes reflectively.

“It is a terrible thing, not to be in control of your own life,” he concluded.

“It’s just how things are,” I said.

“Really?” he said, genuinely interested. “You think so? And yet here I am, in this house, a man of power and influence because I chose to make it so, while you are … what? Not a reporter, that is for sure. Those cuts on your face are recent. So you are … what? A detective? A spy? Working for who? The Grappoli?”

His confusion seemed real, but his manner was somber, and it made me uneasy. I thought of Emtezu, wishing—despite the manner in which he had brought me here—that he had not gone, and I realized his mistake. The news he had wanted me to bring was about the outrage represented by the dead Mahweni herder in the ruins of the tower. He had wanted me to bring this to Sohwetti as evidence of racial atrocity perpetrated by men in the Glorious Third, something to be exposed and punished. But Sohwetti wasn’t interested in that. Not really. He was interested in the land deals, and not because he hadn’t known about them.

The house was utterly silent. I could hear no voices, no distant birdcalls. We were deep in the heart of the building. If I were to run, I would have to go through a labyrinth of rooms and corridors before I made it outside, where armed men and big cats with spiked collars patrolled the grounds.…

Sohwetti was still watching me, waiting for me to answer his question about who I was working for. His eyes were attentive, almost predatory in their focus, and I understood that whatever danger I was in could be held off so long as he thought I had important information. How he might opt to extract it, I did not dare consider.

“I have … connections,” I said. “But I am working for myself.”

“Doing what?”

“Investigating.”

“Come now, Miss Sutonga,” he said, suddenly brusque. “Do not play games with me. I do not have time for such things. What are you investigating?”

“Partly,” I said, watching him carefully, “the disappearance of the Beacon.”

He leaned forward fractionally, and his eyes contracted. “A strange occurrence indeed,” he said, giving nothing away. “Was it the Grappoli?”

“I have found nothing to suggest so.”

“That is my feeling too,” he said. “Though I fear that truth alone will not save us. But you said ‘partly.’ What else are you exploring?”

“The death of a Lani boy called Berrit,” I said simply.