Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(90)

What the poachers took was sold as trophy art or ground into “medicine” overseas. The barbarism of it all, the pointlessness, sickened me, but then, in the stony silence of the police carriage, I had other reasons for that.

The dam had burst, and I was swept away by what came through.

I held Tanish’s body for a long time, and crying seemed to drain me of strength and will, so that I was only partly in the world. The rest of me was nowhere, was nothing, and my sense of what was happening around me was muted, my vision blurred by more than tears, sound echoing faintly, as if coming through fog from a great distance.

Andrews had roared and cursed and said he had been a fool for listening to some slip of a Lani girl, and how was he supposed to look the prime minister in the eye after this fiasco? Von Strahden tried to say that the smuggling bust was a significant achievement, but Andrews told him that no one cared about a few one-horns. We had nothing on Morlak, on Mandel, on Gritt. Nothing at all. It had all been a waste of time.

“I was sure it would be the Beacon,” said Von Strahden, speaking as if in a daze.

“The Beacon!” sneered Andrews darkly. “I suspect that the next people to see the Beacon will be Grappoli troops who dig it out of the rubble of what was Bar-Selehm.”

The two machine gunners were not merely costumed gang members. They were junior police officers from the Fourth Precinct, though who had ordered them to join the operation—if anyone—no one knew. Someone had, presumably, given them the hardware and told them to cut down whoever showed up in the warehouse. They had no interest in the crate and were there—Andrews said—to clean up loose ends. We would never know who hired them because both gunners were dead.

I had done that. I had killed two men whose names I didn’t know, whose faces I never saw. I had done it to save Tanish, and I had failed.

Willinghouse said nothing, just watched me, his eyes hooded, even when the stretcher bearers came to take Tanish away from me. I leaned into his shoulder, staining his clothes with Tanish’s blood, crying as I have never cried for anything before, not even Papa, so that I was not Anglet Sutonga anymore. I was a screaming, writhing, desperate animal of grief and guilt and horror, and it was only Willinghouse’s grip on my shoulders that stopped me from flying into madness.

“Shh,” he whispered. “I will see that he gets the best doctors in the city. He is not dead yet. We will do everything we can. You have my word.”

*

THE POLICE WENT TO PICK up Morlak, but he denied any knowledge of the deal, suggesting this was a sideline operated by Fevel and some of the other boys. There was nothing to connect him to either the poachers or the smugglers for whom he had been the middleman, and Andrews—already humbled by his shamefaced report to the prime minister—said they did not have enough even for a search warrant. If Morlak had the Beacon hidden away in the shed, it would likely stay there for the foreseeable future.

Not that I cared. They told me, and I heard, but that was all. I sat at Tanish’s bedside, holding his hand, reading him the story of the cloud forest, the one we always read together, the one Vestris had once read to me, and I spoke to no one else. He just lay there, small and frail, still and silent.

“Sorry,” I whispered through tears. “I’m so sorry, hummingbird. I would have taken you with me.”

Willinghouse said I should go home and rest, that he would sit with Tanish in my place, but I didn’t respond.

Home.

What did that even mean? His home, I suppose he meant, as if I were living there now, their pet steeplejack. No. That was not my home. But then neither was the Drowning. I hated to admit it, but in my heart, home was the weaving shed on Seventh Street, bleak and miserable though it was, because for the better part of a decade, it had been mine, though I could never go back there again.

Morlak. Everything came back to Morlak. I couldn’t connect all the pieces, but he was at the heart of everything, like a spider in his web, and somehow, in spite of the stolen Beacon, and the fort, in spite of Berrit, Ansveld, and the Mahweni herder, in spite even of Tanish, who lay huddled on the bed in front of me inches from death, Morlak was free and likely to stay that way. The police wouldn’t even search his place because he was, in the eyes of the law, a fine, upstanding citizen.…

I stared at Tanish, tears streaming down my hot face.

“I have to go now, hummingbird,” I whispered, squeezing his tiny hand. “I’ll come back. Unless they kill me, I’ll come back. I promise. But there’s something I have to do.”

The police couldn’t do it, but I, as Andrews and Willinghouse had pointed out so many times, was not police.

*

I STUDIED THE LINE of the shed roof where it met the tower and chimney stack. It was a smooth red brick that gave no climbing purchase, but there were drainpipes, and in places there were rungs set into the wall. Two of the lower windows had been bricked up years ago, but the top one was shuttered, and I could see how to get to it, though it would take nerve.

Nerve, I had. Nerve and fire. When the dam broke, more than grief gushed out, and some of what came slicing through those awful waters had teeth.

I watched a jackal prowl along the street, its sleek body low to the ground, its ears pricked, and as it rounded the corner and trotted out of sight, I moved.

After shinning up the downspout to the roof of the shed, I picked my way softly over the slates, moving almost on all fours, low and swift like the jackal. At the point where the blockish tower reared up from the shed, I squatted, listening. The city was as quiet as it would ever get. Somewhere down Bell Street, I could hear the distant clank of machinery as the night shift worked on, and there was an occasional boom from the foghorn at the river mouth, but otherwise the night was still.