Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(81)

“I’ll say nothing,” I said, fear taking hold. “I promise. I’ll tell no one.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I am weary of this conversation and must take time to consider my choices. Excuse me, Miss Sutonga,” he said, getting to his feet. “You seem like an intelligent and interesting young lady. I wish with all my heart that we had never met.”

And with that he left, locking the door behind him.





CHAPTER

29

I BLINKED, AND THE tears that had clung to my eyes broke through and ran down my face. He wouldn’t come back. Not Sohwetti himself. I was sure of it. Some nameless guard would come to get me, bind my hands, and shuttle me somewhere quiet and removed. Maybe they would just do it here, then dump my body in the ocean. There was a spot not far from here—Tanuga Point—famed for the yellow-finned sharks that haunted the bay. It had been, in the old days, a place of execution, first for some of the Mahweni tribes, then for the northern Feldeslanders, because it was safe to assume that corpses tossed into the water there would be shredded in minutes. No grave, no inconvenient bodies washing ashore to be venerated as political martyrs. To enter the water at Tanuga Point was to go through the great meat grinder of the world, and what emerged was as close to nothing as made no difference.

I could brandish Willinghouse’s name. Or Vestris’s. Both had power and influence, albeit of different kinds, and both would come to my aid if I could reach them. But their worlds were not Sohwetti’s, and their names alone would not save me here.

You have to get out.

That meant forcing the door, since we were in the core of the house and there were no windows … or using the chimney. I considered the fireplace, wiping my tears away and tying my hair back. I doubted it would take Sohwetti long to wrestle with his conscience and find a willing henchman. It didn’t sound like the dead herder in the remains of the Red Fort tower was anything to do with him, but I would be a fool to think he had never been responsible for bloodshed. His manner when he left was downcast, sad even, but not horrified, not appalled by what he was considering. Sohwetti, like many a politician before him, was resigned to expediency.

I snatched up the satchel Emtezu had left behind, pulled its strap over my head, and climbed into the hearth, which showed no sign of recent use. Leaning against the sooty black wall, I looked up. There was an iron damper in the shaft, and I pulled the lever to open it. The opening was narrow and the chimney beyond it utterly lightless, which meant it twisted and turned on its way up.

I remembered my first days in the Seventh Street gang, when I had still been small enough to serve as a chimney sweep for the big houses. Sometimes it was just a matter of shoving a long-handled pole with a brush on the top up the shaft, but in the older houses, especially where there were multiple fireplaces, the chimneys would meander and intersect, narrowing as their walls got caked with old bird nests, masonry shards, and accumulated soot. If the house used a lot of wood, there would be resinous tar that could burn for hours if ignited, and which had to be scraped off with chisels. Angles were tight and the shafts contracted unexpectedly in the blackness, so that getting stuck was a real danger. That had happened once to a boy called Micah. They say he died of fear, and because the owner didn’t want to cut half the wall away to get the body out, they lit all the fires in the house, even though it was the middle of summer. I don’t know if it was true, but I heard that for months afterwards, the remains of his blackened bones continued to tumble down into the grate every time the south wind blew.

Lani children everywhere I turned. Kalla and Berrit, Tanish and me, crammed into the darkness, out of sight, forgotten, burned up like so much trash.…

Stop it.

I squeezed the doors in my head closed again, locking out the rising tide.

At least inside the chimney I would be safe for a while from Sohwetti and his men, none of whom would be able to follow me up.

I worked my hands in through the damper, then my head. It was funny how it all came back, the childish thrill, the dread of the dark and the spiders. I was used to high places, out there in the sky where you could breathe, where you could see what you were doing, but this, the blackness, the closeness and cinder reek of the air, the tightness of the space where the bricks pressed in on shoulders, arms, legs, belly, chest, and head all at the same time, like you were in a long, upright coffin, this was different.

I inhaled raggedly, then stood tall as I could, reaching above me for handholds in the brick. I could feel where the shaft—about a yard across in the fireplace—stepped in. If it got much tighter, I wouldn’t be able to get through. There was nothing to hold on to, so I drew my knees up to my chest, one at a time, and managed to put my boots on the damper. I straightened again, boosting myself another three feet to where the chimney tightened like a python squeezing a springbok. I could see nothing. I could hear nothing beyond the thumping of my heart and the laboring of my breath.

I reached higher and this time felt a ledge on the right-hand side, where the passage seemed to open. There was only one chimney stack on the roof, I reminded myself. That meant that every fireplace in the house connected inside and ran up to the top. Moving sideways might give me the option of dropping into another room, one that was unlocked, or that had windows.…

I dragged myself up and found the shaft angling up and to the right, forming a square, uneven tunnel through which I could crawl. One of the sides of the shaft was now a roof, but one that dipped erratically so that I had to stay low to avoid skinning my forehead. I inched forward, brick after brick moving under my gritty palms.