Not knowing what to say, I just nodded. I had never thought that hopelessness might have an aroma, but if it did, that was what the still, silent air of the room smelled of: hospital sterility and despair.
The nun showed me out, and I had to resist the impulse to hold the door open, to tell the children to run. But then I was being steered into the nursery, an identical room: white, unadorned, and silent, containing eight cagelike cribs. Another nun sat with a book on one of the curiously high stools. She considered us as we entered, bowing fractionally to her sister before returning her eyes to her reading.
“They are all sleeping,” I said, trying to sound impressed.
“It is nap time,” said the nun at my elbow, as if this were obvious. “Every day at this time.”
“That’s very … disciplined,” I said.
“They need structure in their lives,” said the nun. “Most of them are here because their mothers had none of their own—something you might want to pass on to your friend.”
As I left the room, I thought that it smelled less like a hospital and more like a morgue, as if it were a place where spirit came to die. Clutching the basket to my breast with a new and tortured sense of desperation, I walked quickly down the hallway and out.
*
PAUSING ONLY TO PICK up a bottle of sheep’s milk from the Holymound market, I returned to the Martel Court via the labyrinth that was Old Town, a complex of rough, sand-colored stone and spiraling minarets that had been all there was of Bar-Selehm before the whites came. I pulled my hair back, slipped my arms through the handles of the basket, hitching it up onto my back, and climbed up to the shuttered chamber above the clock mechanism, comfortable in the knowledge that I was invisible up there in the smog. But as I withdraw one arm from the handles to work the louvers, the basket shifted and swung, and for a brief, heart-stopping moment, I glanced down into the face of the sleeping child, suspended by a wicker band over eighty feet of nothing but hard, shattering stone.
I clambered inside, my heart racing as if I had been chased over rooftops by Morlak’s gang.
Inside, hanging from a high buttress by its hind legs, was one of the large fox-headed fruit bats that called the city home. It watched me with black, glassy eyes and ruffled its rubbery wings. For a long moment, I just sat there looking at it, and eventually—comfortable that we were no threat to each other—it tucked its head and went to sleep.
What have you done? What are you going to do?
All my excitement about working for Willinghouse, of championing Berrit’s memory and serving as an agent of justice, lay exposed as vain and idiotic in the awful frailty of the sleeping child.
I made the place as safe and accommodating as possible: checked for spiders, flushed the roosting bat out of the shuttered hatch, and lay the baby down in her blankets, my worn-out habbit snuggled next to her—horrified by the scale of my own stupidity. For a long minute I watched her, and when she seemed calm, I left.
The child was safer there than on the streets with me. The day was ending, and every footpad in the city would be on the watch for a Lani steeplejack who had offended Mr. Morlak of Seventh Street.…
Forcing myself to focus on the investigation, I scaled the back of the public library on Winckley Street, waiting in the shadow of a great stone griffin for the newspaper girl’s arrival on the corner below. She dropped from a wagon moments later and set to unloading two pallets of evening papers. I was down, money in hand, in time to be her first customer of the night.
She gave me a curious look but said nothing and handed me the paper. The headline said that the Grappoli ambassador had made a formal protest about the insinuation that his government was in any way associated with the theft of the Beacon. In response, a small crowd had chanted insults outside the embassy till a unit of dragoons dispersed them.
“You can read these as well as sell them?” I asked.
The Mahweni girl bristled. “Every letter,” she returned. “You?”
“Ever heard of Josiah Willinghouse?” I asked.
The question seemed to catch her off guard, but she nodded.
I pocketed my change but left a sixpenny bit on her crate.
She eyed it questioningly and, when I inclined my head a fraction, palmed it. “What do you want to know?” the girl asked, still cautious.
“Anything,” I said. “I expect you read a lot, selling papers all day. I don’t know how much you remember—”
“All of it,” she said.
The boast annoyed me. She caught the look on my face and pushed the coin back across the crate toward me.
I sighed and shoved it back. “Fine,” I said. “You know anything about Willinghouse or not?”