*
WE CROSSED THE RIVER by the fish wharf and reached the Warehouse District an hour early. Pier 7 was on the outer edge of the south-side harbor: strictly cargo served by a single railway siding. Even in daylight it was unsavory, its corridors of stacked containers, squalid shipping offices, and looming, faceless warehouses permanently hung with the stench of the river and the engines that worked it. The worst slums in the city were on this side of the river, and after dark, only those who truly had to go there walked the streets.
The police presence numbered a dozen, not including Andrews, and they bristled with shotguns and breech-loading carbines. I had never seen such firepower outside the dragoons and it made me uneasy.
Andrews arranged his men around the perimeter of the warehouse, dispatching Willinghouse and Von Strahden to a storage facility some distance away. I was supposed to go with them, but I slipped away as soon as we got there, working my way back to Warehouse 3 by way of the corrugated roofs, service gantries, and freight cranes that made it possible to cover almost the entire distance without ever touching the ground.
A series of long ventilation shutters ran along the warehouse’s ridgeline, and I was able to jimmy one open and squeeze through, dropping silently onto a maintenance catwalk. It ran to a shuttered observation booth suspended from the roof, but otherwise, there was nothing up there. Below, the warehouse was spread out; a mass of heaped crates, pallets, and sacks lost in shadow save where a single gas lamp glowed. The place smelled of the sea, rusting metal, and the warm, dry pine of the crates. I lay on my back, trying to get glimpses of the stars through the vents, listening.
It was nearly done. In an hour, we would have the Beacon, answers, and—shortly thereafter—peace. It was about time.
For a long while, nothing stirred in the warehouse, and some of my excitement began to drain away as I put all my effort into keeping still. When a door somewhere finally creaked open, it did so loudly, clumsily, and with it came the sound of conversation and a bark of laughter. They were either very confident or out of their depth.
I rolled slowly onto my stomach, feeling the slight sway of the catwalk as I shifted, staring through the welded footplates to the little pool of bluish light below. I recognized Fevel, the black man who had chased me the night I was taken to Willinghouse’s place, and two others whose faces I couldn’t see from above.
It was those two who were carrying the crate. When they set it down, Fevel sat on it, as if to prove his nonchalance, and lit a cigar. I saw the yellow flare of his match, and the tiny red glow as he drew on it. My mouth was dry. Fevel had sentenced me to die in the tower and was prepared to finish the job when I’d survived.
I felt the weight of the loaded revolver in my satchel, as I watched him from above like a perching eagle. He was no more than fifty or sixty feet away, and after a few moments, I could smell the smoke from his cigar, but I was invisible to him in the shadows of the roof. I thought of the Lani myth of the angel of death, who swoops unseen to carry off the departed, then of Gritt, the devil-man the Mahweni called Tchanka. Would he make an appearance tonight? It would be tidy if he did, and would make his conviction easier, but I had no desire to see him. The man’s reputation had worked itself into the dark places of my head.
I thought of the tap of the cane between the footsteps in the fog the night Billy had died. Had that been him, or Morlak? I was as sure as I could be that it hadn’t been Mnenga, and that was a bigger relief than I had expected.
On the warehouse floor, the big Mahweni had a shotgun, which he cracked and checked. Fevel produced a pistol and toyed with it. The other boys had crowbars and knives, and they fidgeted with them, putting on a show of strength they didn’t quite believe.
The Westsiders arrived five minutes later, led by Deveril himself, complete with his feathered top hat. He had another four with him, big men armed with rifles and boat hooks. They looked to be Lani, and they moved with the splayed, rolling gait of men used to being onboard ship. Fevel and the boys instinctively clustered, outgunned and outmanned in every sense of the term.
Up there in the roof, I could feel the tension, the menace, as if it were drifting up to me on the cigar smoke.
The Westsiders spread out, creating a wide circle around Fevel and the box, but the conversation, when it started, was so low that I couldn’t catch what was said. One of them threw a bag of coins to the floor at Fevel’s feet, but he did not move from his seat, waiting instead for one of the boys to stoop to it, check it, and pronounce it acceptable. It was only when the boy tipped his face up to speak that I realized who it was.