They couldn’t come up after me, so they were lighting the fires.
I crawled another yard, moving so fast that I almost fell when the floor of my awful tunnel simply stopped. I reached blindly into the space in front of me and, finding only air, had to swallow down a sob of panic as I reached around and up. I was at an intersection, perhaps the biggest in the house, and as I decided whether to try to cross the abyss that had opened up in front of me, I caught the distinct movement of the smoke coiling up from below, thick and gray, smeared with a sulfurous yellow.
I blinked. I could see the smoke. And that meant …
Above me, the chimney flue narrowed to a square of bluish light.
Sky.
I reached across, testing for the far wall, then braced my feet against it and scrabbled for handholds in the brick. For a moment I was hanging over the emptiness of the shaft below like an insect, and then I was climbing, the smoke billowing about me, thick and hot. I coughed again, but knew that hesitation meant death. I fixed my eyes on that square of light and hauled myself up. Where there were no handholds, I used the strength of my knees and back, bracing myself across the shaft and walking up the flue as I had done at the cement works the day we found Berrit’s body.
The temperature was rising fast. Too fast. I glanced back down and saw not merely the dense swirl of gray smoke, but flashes of orange too. Part of the unswept chimney had caught fire.
Great, I thought. I’m going to die ironically.
I swallowed hard and pushed my way up to where the breeze from outside was dragging the smoke and flames upward. I pushed the clay chimney pot clear, seized the mortar cap, and dragged myself up and out onto the roof. I had barely moved more than a couple of yards over the tile when the smoking chimney became a jet of fire, shrieking up out of the flue and scattering sparks. I moved as far away as I could, but my coughing doubled me up and I spat soot.
I could hear voices, people running around outside. They would have guns, so I stayed low. But as I looked cautiously about, trying to find a safe way down, I realized that the smoke wasn’t all coming from the chimney. The sparks from the blaze were scattering all over the house, and in at least two places the lower thatch, Sohwetti’s concession to his Mahweni roots, was already ablaze.
I moved upwind, toward the front of the house, going quicker than I would like, banking that the fire would take more of their attention than hunting for me. I reached the edge of the roof, found an ornamental buttress carved to resemble a buffalo head, climbed the first ten feet down, and dropped the last five onto a portion of thatch that wasn’t yet ablaze. I loped along, bent over like a monkey, then slid down a snake-shaped column, spiraling as I went, and hit the ground at a staggering run.
I didn’t go down the road to the gate, but through the wooded parkland to the high wall of the estate, where—still coughing, still holding off my smoldering exhaustion—I pulled myself up. As I sat on top of the wall and risked a last look back at the house through the shrubbery and the great tower of yellowish smoke rising from it, a black weancat with a collar, its spots just visible in the sheen of its coat, gave me a long look with bright yellow eyes.
I felt no fear, and was sure that even on the ground only feet from the beast, I would be in no danger, and not because it was a pet that looked dangerous only to people who didn’t know the truth. This, in spite of its collar, was a wild and powerful hunter, a creature of speed and stealth that would kill without hesitation. But it was also somehow, and in ways that made no literal sense, me, and I felt only an uncanny kinship with the creature.
It was an animal out of place, separate from its kind, fatherless, uncertain of who it was, who it could trust, knowing the collar was there but knowing also that it was a collar of the mind: when the moment was right, you could refuse to believe in the collar and it would go away. And that was essential, because all the cat had was itself: muscle and sinew, claw, tooth and bone, senses, experience, skill, instinct and roaring, blood-pumping animal need. Nothing else, not the wall, not the strange people, not the food and water meted out at regular times daily, and not—most certainly not—the collar, none of it mattered one iota.
I dropped onto the other side of the wall and ran.
CHAPTER
30
“WHAT’S THIS?” ASKED SARAH, considering the sheaf of papers I had pushed into her hands.
“Your first story,” I said.
It had taken me over an hour to get back into Bar-Selehm through the orchards and gardens behind the oceanfront mansions, twice as long as it had then taken me to cover the familiar streets to the newspaper stand on the corner of Winckley and Javisha. I had paused only once at a fountain just south of Tanuga Point to wash the worst of the soot and smoke from my clothes and hair.