“No one will come for a couple of damned fuzzies. They didn’t come for the last one.”
“Yes,” said the other voice. “As a matter of fact, they did, and he was an old man with no children, a bush wanderer. The men on my team are citizens of the city. They have wives and families, and you will not treat them as disposable labor to bury your mistakes. God, you disgust me!”
There was a chill silence, and then the gruff voice I had never heard before but which I knew in my bones came from Sergeant Major Claus Gritt, the devil-man Mnenga called Tchanka, the man who had stalked me in the street and run his sword stick through Billy Jennings’s chest, spoke again.
“Now, you listen to me, politician. This is our mistake, not mine, and if you address me in that tone again, I’ll be strewing your joints out there with the fuzzies, for the vultures. Do you hear me?” There was a muffled sound, which I took to be assent, and then Gritt added, “Now, fetch me that crowbar, the long one, and we’ll try levering this onto its side. Maybe we can roll it into place.”
“Give me a moment. I don’t feel well.”
I kept very still, breathing shallowly, listening as they worked, trying to decide how much more I needed to see and hear.
Over the next few minutes, they tried different ways of shifting the rock, but eventually they gave up, cursing, and there was a long, ragged silence while the two men fought to get their breath back.
“If Mandel hadn’t gotten cold feet we’d be able to do it,” said the smoother voice.
“That’s neither here nor there,” said Gritt.
“You said he was in all the way,” said the other. “You said he’d protect us, that he’d make sure no one looked too closely till it had all blown over.”
“Leave the colonel out of this,” said Gritt. “He has to be more careful than us. He has more to lose.”
“And always has had.”
“Meaning what?” Gritt demanded.
“We weren’t all born with silver spoons in our mouths. If we had, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“There is no mess. Our investment will take a little longer to mature, is all, and when it does, our profits will be greater since we have the colonel’s shares.”
“And if someone finds it before then?”
“They won’t if we can block the cave, so I suggest you get off your fancy trousered behind and get to work.”
I thought furiously. Surely, I had enough. I had names, I had the location, and I had a complete sense of the story. I couldn’t prove all of it, but I wouldn’t get that evidence standing here. It was time to go for help.
I turned, but found the passage behind me blocked. Silhouetted at the corner of the tunnel was a figure in gray, a bright but purposeful-looking pistol in her raised hand.
“Greetings, sister mine,” said Vestris.
CHAPTER
36
I DID NOT PLEAD for her to let me go. I did not remind her of old times or sisterly bonds. I did not ask her why. I did not tell her we could all walk away from this if only we kept our heads and didn’t do anything rash. That’s what people in books did, and that was where it worked. Not here, not now, and I would not humiliate myself by trying.
But I felt it all. I had known that she was almost certainly involved, but a part of me was sure she would be able to explain, that it had been some strange misunderstanding, that she had been caught up in something driven by other people. But in the seconds after she had spoken in the passage, I looked into her eyes as well as into the muzzle of her gun, and I knew the truth in my heart. She was not the person I had thought her, and she did not care for me at all. I didn’t know why, would never know why, but it felt like a part of me had been cut away, torn out like the rhino’s horn, so that life was pouring out of me through the ragged hole.
Not just life. It was the way I had thought the world was, the things that I loved and valued. That was what was gushing out of the wound Vestris’s betrayal had made. I gazed at her, the beautiful woman who had once been half sister, half mother to me and Rahvey, so graceful, still smelling faintly of sandalwood and violets. But the glow I had always felt around her, the light and warmth that made you feel special when it touched you—that was gone.
“Sergeant Major!” she called. “Come out here, please, and relieve my sister of her gun. She is strong. She may be the third pair of hands you need to do your job.”
I heard him move into the crevice behind me, smelled his sweat, felt his strong hands snatch the revolver from my belt; then he turned me around and looked into my face, smiling without humor.
“Miss Sutonga,” he said in a voice cold as the steel of his sword stick. “You have been in the wars, haven’t you? I am glad to see you again. We have unfinished business.” His eyes were hard and bright, and inside them was nothing at all.
The Tchanka, I thought. The jackal-headed devil-man who slinks under the door and eats your children. Berrit and Tanish—even, somehow, Kalla.