Tanish was sitting on the ground, his back to the trunk. Ignoring Andrews’s shout to stay back, I ran to him, dropped, and folded him in a crushing embrace, pressing his cheek to mine.
“It’s all right, Tanish,” I babbled, pulling him to me. “It’s over now.”
Police officers were swarming all over the place. Two of Deveril’s men were dead or badly hurt. Fevel too. Whoever had been operating that machine gun hadn’t cared which gang they hit.
“What the hell was that?” exclaimed Andrews, who was dragging a wounded Deveril—his top hat battered but still on his head—out into the light.
“Ambush, sir,” said one of the officers. “Someone wanted them all wiped out.”
“And with military-grade hardware and police uniforms,” spat Andrews. “When I study that machine gun, am I going to find that it’s gone missing from storage belonging to the Glorious Third?”
Deveril shrugged, wincing at the wound in his right arm as he did so. “What can I tell you?” he said. “Seems I have enemies in high places.” He chose the words carefully, and for a moment, his gaze fell on me.
“Well, gentlemen,” said Willinghouse, appearing beside the crate with Von Strahden. I guess I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t obeyed Andrews’s orders to keep clear. Both men were wearing the smoked glasses worn by luxorite dealers. “Shall we see what someone was so desperate to recover?”
Andrews stepped back, and one of the policemen flipped the hasps on the crate and pulled the lid open.
I flinched instinctively, and I don’t think I was the only one, but there was no explosion of light from within, just a large and shapeless mass wrapped in oilskin. Andrews stooped to help, and together they lifted the package out and onto the warehouse floor. The policeman unfastened some lacing, then flapped the fabric open so that it spilled its contents.
Still no luxorite glare, and for a moment, I could only stare in baffled dismay. The oilskin contained perhaps twenty roughly conical objects that curved toward the tip. They were about two feet long and hard, the bases ragged and stained with what looked like blood. I continued to gape, but could make no sense of what I was seeing till Andrews, his head in his hands so that his mouth was muffled and the words came out low and indistinct, spoke.
“Rhino horn.”
There was a stunned silence.
Overcome with a new wave of nausea, I started to get to my feet, but as Tanish began to slump, I caught him in my arms again.
“Hey,” I said. “Come on, Tanish. Stand up.”
He did not respond. He felt unnaturally heavy.
“Tanish?” I said.
But the boy did not move. Had not moved.
No.
One of my hands was wet and sticky.
“Hummingbird?”
Still nothing.
No.
I pulled back to look at him properly, and it was only then that I saw the dark pool beneath him, silvery in the eerie glow of the gas lamp. I stared, speechless, feeling his blood run through my fingers, and then I was rocking him again, violently now, desperately, and someone was screaming.
The doors to my heart, the dam I had fought so hard to keep closed, had broken at last.
CHAPTER
33
POACHING THE GREAT BEASTS of the savannah was an old Feldesland problem, but it was only recently that it had become a major business concern, ivory and horn commanding astronomical prices on the Grappoli market and elsewhere where the great beasts were exotic, even magical. Once last year, some kids had come upon a one-horn stumbling about on the edge of the Drowning. She was blind and crippled by rifle fire but had somehow got back on her feet even after the poachers had sawed off her horn. She blundered around for a while, bleeding heavily, mad from the pain, and eventually collapsed down by the river. It took another two hours for her to die.
What the poachers took was sold as trophy art or ground into “medicine” overseas. The barbarism of it all, the pointlessness, sickened me, but then, in the stony silence of the police carriage, I had other reasons for that.
The dam had burst, and I was swept away by what came through.
I held Tanish’s body for a long time, and crying seemed to drain me of strength and will, so that I was only partly in the world. The rest of me was nowhere, was nothing, and my sense of what was happening around me was muted, my vision blurred by more than tears, sound echoing faintly, as if coming through fog from a great distance.
Andrews had roared and cursed and said he had been a fool for listening to some slip of a Lani girl, and how was he supposed to look the prime minister in the eye after this fiasco? Von Strahden tried to say that the smuggling bust was a significant achievement, but Andrews told him that no one cared about a few one-horns. We had nothing on Morlak, on Mandel, on Gritt. Nothing at all. It had all been a waste of time.
“I was sure it would be the Beacon,” said Von Strahden, speaking as if in a daze.