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.
Stay focused. Keep going.
Something moved in my hair, and I brushed at it with revolted feverishness, which banged my head against the shaft wall. For a moment, the darkness was flecked with light and color, and I had to fight not to lose a sense of where I was, which way was up. It was only noise from below that brought me to my senses.
A click, like a door. Then hurried footsteps and the clank of the damper as someone tried to see up. I had left that shaft now and would be invisible to them, even if they had a light source, but it wouldn’t matter. They knew where I was.
I picked up the pace, my bruised knees, back, and hands aching from the effort, and now I could hear raised voices, not just back the way I had come, but from all over the house, as every fireplace bore their voices up through the labyrinth of flues.
Faster.
Going down to one of the other fireplaces and slipping out of the house unnoticed was not an option anymore. I had to make it to the roof.
The shaft stank, as chimneys always did, of carbonized wood and bitumen and old smoke. New smoke, fresh and sharp enough to set you coughing, was an entirely different thing, and I recognized it with a new thrill of horror.