Luxorite, when first mined, glows far beyond the shine of other precious gems or metals. It has an inner light so potent that a fragment no larger than a grain of sand is as bright as a candle. A few grains together, or a piece such as you might mount in a finger ring, might light a large room in the dead of night. At its mature best, a piece of luxorite is too bright to look at directly, a hard, white light tending to blue that produces sharp-edged shadows. In time it degrades, its light softening and yellowing to amber, but that takes decades, and a single stone might light a wealthy mansion for generations.
A thin seam of the stuff had been exposed by accident on the edge of the river hundreds of years ago. The Mahweni, the black hunters and herders who lived there, treated the place as magical, but eventually began to trade fragments of it for the ironware being worked in the north. Soon settlers came for the luxorite, not because it was beautiful—though it was—but because it was useful, and for a time, it lit their mines and factories as well as their extravagant homes.
But the seam was soon exhausted, and though tiny pockets of luxorite were found nearby, nothing like the expected quantity ever came to light. Soon what little had been mined took on once more the aura of the magical. It was beyond precious. The mines and factories were plumbed for gaslight, and their luxorite sold for more ostentatious use elsewhere. Now, the discovery of an aged grain whose yellow light might fuel little more than a hand lantern would feed a family for several months, but that happened so rarely that the price of the mineral was one of the most stable of all traded commodities in the region. The piece that had been the Beacon was not just priceless; it was also irreplaceable. There was no new luxorite in Bar-Selehm, and the city’s heart now was industry and trade. The Mahweni who had shown the white settlers the first seam now wore overalls and fed coal into the city’s steam engines and factories. And so Bar-Selehm evolved.
It took Tanish and me twenty minutes to leave the fetid sourness of the Drowning behind, and as much again to enter the city proper. We didn’t have money for the underground so we hopped a ride on the back of an oxcart for a half mile, slipping down when the driver turned toward the Hashti temple on the edge of the shambles. Tanish loved that, and I, pleased by his delight, managed to push away any thoughts of Papa; of the boy called Berrit, who had died exactly two years after him; and of the blood oath I had just taken.
Twenty-four hours from now, you will have a child to take care of.…
Beyond a dull dread, the thought meant almost nothing to me, an idea spoken in a foreign tongue.
Well, I thought unhelpfully, you’ll find out.
We walked another half hour, feeling the city grow up around us till the sky became crowded with offices and shops and the world seemed to constrict. I would take the anonymity of the city over the provincial watchfulness of the Drowning any day, or the savagery of the wilderness beyond it, but its hardness and gloom were undeniable.
“I’m going to go and get my tools,” I said. “Maybe get an hour in before it’s too dark.”
“Morlak will be at the shed,” said Tanish warningly. “You might not want to see him today. He was in a bad mood this morning to begin with.”
“Why?”
“Out all night drinking, I think. Didn’t make it back till after we got up, so he probably slept rough. You know what that does to his mood. And since then, he lost his new apprentice.” He looked down as he said it, caught between shame and sadness that this was how Berrit’s death would be seen: like misplacing a hammer or a chisel.
I ruffled his hair again. “I can handle Morlak,” I said.
He smiled wanly, almost able to believe it, and I pressed a couple of coins into his hand.
“Go get yourself something to eat,” I said. “Don’t go back to the shed for an hour or two. It will be better when everyone else is coming off shift.”
Better meant safer. Morlak was more than capable of punishing my apprentice to spite me for my defiance.
“What did you say to the police?” he asked. The words burst out of him as if he had been saving them up.
“About what?” I asked.
“Berrit,” he answered. “You seemed upset. With the police, I mean.”
“I just don’t think…,” I began, but hesitated. Tanish’s eyes were wide and apprehensive. “They weren’t respectful. To the body.”
It was a half truth at best, but I didn’t want to worry him further.
He considered me, deciding to accept what I had said at face value, and then he was walking away down Ream Street toward the old flag market, where the remaining fruit would be on sale.
*