Free A Novel by A. J. Hartley

impassive as his face, he said, “Let’s not make things more difficult than they need to be, shall we, Miss Sutonga?”
    â€œHow do you know my name?” I asked as the carriage slowed, then turned and resumed its former rattling pace.
    â€œAll that will become clear,” said the man evenly.
    â€œWhere are we going?” I asked.
    Neither man responded, watching me now as if I had not spoken at all. I had no choice but to sit and wait.
    I wasn’t sure how long we drove. Ten minutes? Twenty? Once a woman laughed—a high keening that sounded like a shout of pain until the end—and once I thought I heard the driver talking as the carriage stopped, but none of it gave me a sense of where we were. I used my free hand to release my hair and tipped my head forward so that it fell about my face like a veil.
    When we finally stopped, the one with the truncheon produced from his pocket a black velvet bag with a drawstring. “Put this on, please,” he said, tossing it to me.
    I looked at it, feeling stupid and afraid. “Put it on?” I echoed.
    â€œOver your head,” said the man with the truncheon. “It’s a blindfold.”
    I hesitated, suddenly so frightened that I could barely move.
    â€œPut it on,” said the man, his voice still low and uninflected. “Or we will put it on for you.” He said it matter-of-factly. If there was any emotion beneath the words it was boredom, and somehow this scared me more than if he had threatened.
    I pulled the bag over my head and lost the world entirely.
    In the confusion that followed, I was manhandled firmly but without obvious cruelty out into the night, then into somewhere more confined, where the soles of my boots rang on hard floors. My hands were held behind my back, but I was not bound, and I was guided expertly, so that only once did I jar my shoulder against a doorjamb as I was steered through. Then I was pushed into a chair and released. I snatched the blindfold from my head as the door behind me closed heavily, and I heard it lock as I swiveled to see if I was alone.
    I was.
    The room was unlike anywhere I had ever been, and I rose from the chair with a new sense of strangeness. It was pristine, the floor matted with expensive grass braid, the furnishings fashioned from lustrous, striped timber. Most of the decoration was elegantly northern, and the books that lined the walls were in Feldish, but there were tribal masks in red and black that looked Mahweni, and there was a statue of an elephant god in black stone. There were Lani paintings on the wall, showing the story of the young god Semtaleen, who stole light from the stars to bring fire to man—as Papa had told me when I was very young.
    A candelabrum suspended from a plaster rose in the center of the ceiling was lit by a dozen tiny glass globes. I stared, barely able to believe it: Each globe contained a grain of luxorite. The light was clear and strong and only very slightly yellow. It would take a Lani day laborer the better part of a year to earn enough to purchase one of those little lights.
    There were two doors into the room, but the only windows were set near the high ceiling and showed only the night sky. I would need to stack at least one chair onto the desk to reach the ledge. I moved to it and took hold of its exquisitely inlaid top, hoping to drag it under the window, but it was too heavy. I was around the other side, bent at the waist, and pushing when I heard the door behind me click open.
    I braced for the impact of an attack, but nothing happened.
    I turned to find a young white man in gold-rimmed spectacles and a crisp suit moving toward the desk as if nothing could be more normal. I say he was white, but as soon as I had made the assessment, I was less sure. He was tanned, though his skin was still several shades lighter than my own, and his hair was black and glossy as the wing of a starling, but when he looked at me through his