Slither and Ivy got on me the minute they let me in the house. “Guys. Guys! I want this kind of crap I can get married. I need food. I need sleep. I need a bath. I need that foul-mouth flamingo strangled so I can do the rest without getting so aggravated I have to kill somebody.” The bird must have saved up for my homecoming.
I got some money from the Dead Man’s room, studied him suspiciously before I left. Was that a restrained amusement I sensed there for just a second?
I sent Slither out for supplies. I told Ivy to let me have three hours of sleep. When he woke me up, I wanted food and bath water ready. Then I dragged me upstairs and splashed me into my bed. The Dead Man could get the bugs out later. I lay there tossing and turning and listening to the Goddamn Parrot cackle for half a sentence, then it was time to get up.
Ivy did his part like that was all he had to live for. I rose on time. I scrubbed up in my ten-gallon copper tub. Downstairs, I found a classic breakfast waiting. Ivy was as drunk as a skunk, the Goddamn Parrot on his shoulder. The bird wasn’t talking. It needed its whole attention just to hang on. Its breath was worse than Ivy’s. Maybe Slither got him his own bottle. Good old Slither, looking out for everybody.
I stuffed myself, then told the boys, “I was going to run you guys off again today, but I don’t think I’m going to have time. Either of you has a good afternoon, I want you to get out and look for a place, find a job. I’m not going to take care of you forever.”
Slither nodded. Ivy said, “There’s some letters for you.”
“Letters?”
“We didn’t let nobody see you,” Slither explained. “Mainly on account of you wasn’t here. So some people wrote you letters. We put them on your desk.”
There were three letters. Two showed no indication whence they sprang. The other bore Morley’s chop. It was a nag about where the hell was I last night? He couldn’t waste all his valuable time playing my games if I wasn’t going to show up.
By now he would know why I hadn’t. Him and his thugs probably thought it was funny.
I opened a letter that purported to be from Maggie Jenn. She wanted to meet. Oh? Right. “Slither! You remember who brought these?”
The big man leaned through the doorway. “That one was brung by a lady. Cute little bug of a thing with red hair.”
Surprise, surprise. Bold little witch . . . Oh, horrible thought! What if this was the real Maggie Jenn, come in from her island hideout?
No. Because I didn’t want that.
“That one you done opened come from your friend with the funny ears.”
“Morley Dotes. I know.” I picked up the last one. “How about this?”
“One of them fellas that was here when I had my seizure brung that one.”
“One of those lunatics from the Call?”
“Them fellas what tried to push you around.”
That didn’t make sense. I supposed I’d have to open the letter to straighten it out.
It was from Emerald Jenn. She would talk to me if I would meet her at a certain estate south of TunFaire. I didn’t know the estate, but I did know the area. I’d met Eleanor out there. Folks down there were a lot like folks from the Hill—only way more reactionary. Their wealth consisted of land rather than treasure or power. A more smugly self-righteous, bigoted bunch would be hard to imagine.
Emerald Jenn’s suggested meeting place wasn’t far from the main estate of Marengo North English.
Interesting.
“How is your memory, Slither?”
“I’m pretty good today, Garrett.”
He didn’t sound good, but I had to take his word. “Need you to run over to Morley’s. Tell him I’m coming, he wants to get on with what we talked about last night. You manage that?”
He thought about it. “I can do it. You got it. Now?”
“Always a great time to start.”
“Pretty rough out there, Garrett. They’re killing each other in the streets.”
“Take Ivy, makes you feel better.”
“I was thinking about you.”
“I’ll take my chances.” Wise ass. Do I carry a sign only I can’t see? Garrett’s ego. Kick here.
I occupied the stoop in order to field marshal Slither’s departure. I checked the street, too. “I know how a horse apple feels,” I told Ivy, who was inside the doorway and had to have the allusion explained. “Flies?”
All my fans were back. Except for the fierce pirates. Grange Cleaver friends seemed scarce.
I predicted that, didn’t I?
I shrugged, went inside, and scribbled a note to Maggie Jenn. Ivy could give it to whomever came around to get my reply.
“Getting predictable in your old age,” I told Dotes, settling beside him on the exact set of steps where I’d guessed he would be waiting.
“Me? I’m here because I knew this is where you would come looking. I didn’t want you wasting time stumbling around looking for me.”
Invisible sign. Absolutely. “Can we take him?”
“He’s caught. Nobody is so lucky he gets out of what I have set.” He glanced left, at smoke rising in the distance. “Quiet out.” The street should have been busier.
All streets should have been busier. Slither was right. They were killing each other out here—though it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Block’s heavies were fast on their feet. And they had the army garrison to help discourage disorder.
Trouble never got a chance to grow up.
Too, word was out that Marengo North English didn’t approve. He said this wasn’t the time. The captains of many sister nut groups agreed. They asked for restraint now, promising license later.
“Interesting times,” I told Morley.
“It’s always something.” Like he hadn’t the least concern. “Well, here’s our guest.”
The clumsy guy smelled a rat. He was moving carefully. Trouble was, his sniffer wasn’t sensitive enough. It was too late by the time he got a good whiff.
Morley waved. “Come on over.”
The guy looked around. Just the way he moved you could tell he thought his luck was with him still. He was in it up to his chin but knew he always got out. So maybe this time he would fall up and blow away on the breeze. A regular dandelion seed.
Morley’s friends and relatives and employees closed a ring. Luck failed its compact with our man. Gravity didn’t reverse itself.
I thumbed a wood chip while Morley watched the man get a grip on his disappointment.
“Pull up a step, Ace,” I told him.
He did, but he had the fidgets. He kept looking for his lucky exit.
I told him, “I didn’t really want you. But I can’t get ahold of Winger.” Not that I’d tried.
“What? Who?”
“Your girlfriend. Big blond goof with no common sense, always has an angle, never tells the truth if a lie will do. Her.”
“Part of that fits everybody in this thing,” Morley said. “Even up on the Hill, they turned the truth to quicksilver.”
“Untruths, too.”
“Quicksilver lies. I like that.”
“Deadly quicksilver lies.” I spotted friend C.J. Carlyle. “Look who missed the slaughter at Maggie Jenn’s place.”
Our guest eyed us as though he was sure we were loony. Winger must have mentioned my stint in the Bledsoe. He never noticed C.J. I said, “No telling what story you got from Winger. She comes up with some tall ones. I’ve known her since she came to town. I don’t remember her ever telling the truth if there wasn’t a profit in it.”
Our man didn’t reply, but his skill at hiding his thoughts did not exceed his skill at tailing.
He was inept but loyal. He stayed clammed. I told him, “I want to get ahold of her mainly as a friend.” That hadn’t been the case the night before. A few hours had altered my perspective. “I no longer think she could tell me anything I don’t know. I am sure I know a few things she doesn’t. Things that could get her killed. Maybe right after they get you killed.”
Not only did I get him thinking, I got his attention.
He didn’t plan to die for love. Guys just aren’t romantic anymore. He had something going with Winger—and he had a real good idea just what that was worth.
He didn’t speak up, though.
“She isn’t going to get those books,” I told him. “Not a chance. All the guts and luck you can muster won’t get that done.”
The man stayed clammed. So did Morley, though he looked like he wanted to hear more. I told him, “When you get past all the blown smoke, Winger and Cleaver are after a set of first editions of When No Ravens Went Hungry. Winger has the notion she can get them away from the Rainmaker.” She had an even sillier notion that she could decipher the clues in them once she had them.
“The woman doesn’t suffer from any lack of self-confidence.”
“Trouble is, she’s digging through the wrong haystack. The Rainmaker doesn’t have the firsts. He could have grabbed them all, but he didn’t pay attention so the one he did come up with got away.”
Morley gave me a big evil dark-elf grin. “Why do I get the feeling you’re going to explain everything again? How come I have the notion I ought to bet the deed to the Joy House against you?”
I snarled at our captive, “Tell Winger she’s wasting her dreams. Cleaver can’t lay hands on more than two books. Go on. Get out of here.”
Baffled, the man went, maybe thinking he had found another angle to his luck.
Morley asked, “What was that? I set up a major operation, then you mutter some cryptic stuff at the guy and let him go.”
“You fooling somebody? You know this mess has got to do with Eagle’s treasure.”
“Maybe. Sort of. I had a passing interest when I thought you’d stumbled onto something there in the West End.”
“What you told me then was the key to the whole thing,” I exaggerated. That wasn’t a lie. Not really. Not exactly.
The truth was I was guessing again, playing with the known information. I had it figured out, but as Dotes hinted, I’d been wrong before. I yelled after Winger’s friend, “Tell Winger what I said.” To Morley, “She’ll ignore me and do something dumb, but this way my conscience will be satisfied.”
I expected more grief about letting Winger’s guy go. But after the one snip, Morley leaned back and, apparently, never gave it a second thought.
I started to nag him. . . .
“Can it, Garrett. Once upon a time I had a notion. But I changed my mind.”
I awarded him the grandfather of all raised eyebrows.
“Last night Julie wasn’t there to distract me. I got to thinking about Eagle’s saga. And guess what I realized? Nowhere does it say that the jerk was really rich—by our standards.”
I indulged in a self-satisfied smirk. My good buddy was telling me I’d figured the angles right. “You ever wonder how Eagle murdered those slaves? If he was so blind and feeble he needed them to haul and bury his treasure, how could he get the angle on them slick enough to off them all?”
Obviously, Morley hadn’t wondered. “Sometimes I do like the way your mind works, Garrett.”
“Let me tell you something you maybe don’t know.” I hadn’t known till I got it from Linda Lee, back when I was reading sagas. “Most of the sagas were composed at the instigation of the guys they’re about. The No Ravens thing was done by Eagle’s sister’s grandson, partly in collaboration with the old man himself. And they started long before the business of the mocking women, the treasure, and the murdered slaves.”
“I’m sure you’ll get to the point eventually.”
“You see it. Unless you’re slower than you pretend. Say a guy is paying to have puff stories written about him. Not only will he decide what he wants put in and built up, he’ll decide what gets played down or left out.”
“You mean like maybe Eagle wasn’t a big success just because he was treacherous and quick with a blade? Maybe he had a small natural talent as a wizard?”
“Bingo! He was accused by others, but obviously it wasn’t anything major, nothing backed by formal training. He wouldn’t have stayed quiet about it if he’d had a sheepskin declaring him a heavyweight ass-kicker. But he had something that helped him slide through the tight places.”
“There’ll be curses on the treasure, then.”
“That’s the way these things are done.”
“There’ll be ill-tempered ghosts in the neighborhood.”
“What are murders for?”
The Eagle sort isn’t uncommon. Usually he tries to parlay his lucky genetic draw into a big, fast score. Manipulating the fall of dice is a favorite pastime. Hobbling around on crutches after getting found out is another.
“Also, if you ask me, it couldn’t be much of a treasure, even if it hasn’t been found. They figured wealth different back then.”
“Indeed. And here’s a thought.” Which he didn’t bother to relate.
“Well?” I snapped.
“Just checking to see if you’ve taken up your partner’s evil habit of reading minds. Or have started reasoning from the available evidence.”
“Not me.”
“Silver, Garrett. Silver. You said it. They figured wealth differently in primitive times. Silver wasn’t worth much.”
It was now, though. Even with the war seemingly settled and the mines solidly in Karentine hands, the silver shortage was severe. The disappearance of silver coinage threatened to strangle business.
Silver fuels most heavyweight sorcery. Lately its value has been on a par with gold. The Royal Mint has been valiant in its efforts to produce alternate means of exchange, some of which are pretty unwieldy.
Silver. An apparent opportunity to unearth an old cache would excite all sorts of greed.
“By the Devil Harry,” I swore, rolling out one of my granny’s favorites. “Maybe you just tripped over the real core of the thing.” That might even explain why a nose-hoister like Marengo North English would take an interest in the daughter of the notorious Maggie Jenn. It might explain why all this insanity had come to a head at this point in time.
The silver shortage wasn’t likely to ease soon. Maybe never if the wrong people grabbed control of mine production.
“But what do I do about it?” I muttered.
Morley frowned my way. “Excuse me?”
“I think you’re right. We have all sorts interested in Eagle’s treasure because of the distorted metals market. People who wouldn’t have given it a thought in normal times. Probably including my honey’s daddy.”
“Here comes that explanation.” He stunned me by hoisting an eyebrow.
I got my breath back. “You been practicing.”
“Almost forever. What about Chaz’s father?”
“Call it intuition, but I’d bet your deed to the Joy House that what he really hated losing to the Rainmaker and Maggie back when was a first edition of the middle volume of When No Ravens Went Hungry. Which Emerald took when she ran away from home. Which she gave to Wixon and White for safekeeping, or they got it away somehow. That book is why I was hired. It’s why Emerald was framed up with the black magic stuff. Cleaver knew where she was. He couldn’t get to her. He thought he’d toss me in there to butt heads with the human rights guys and maybe break her loose.”
I rolled right along till I took note of Morley’s smug smile. He stared into infinity, listening with half an ear. “What?”
“I was right. It’s another explanation. You realize your theories clash?”
“We’re not talking mutually exclusive, though. We have a lot of secret motives driving people. You aren’t helping me for the same reason I’m helping Chaz’s pop.”
“I won’t argue that, though I wish I was. You made up your mind yet?”
“Huh?”
“About what to do now.”
“I’m going to stroll out to this estate. See what Emerald says.”
“Flashing more nerve than brains, Garrett. You’re jumping into deep doodoo.”
I laughed. The professional lifetaker couldn’t say one word that flowed easily from naughty six-year-olds. “With my eyes open.”
“You’re doing a Winger on me, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“You’ve got an angle.”
“I’m just not as paranoid as you. And I know how to talk to those people. You stroke their egos and let them think you love the cracks in their pots and they’ll act like you’re visiting royalty.”
Dotes didn’t agree but didn’t argue. He suggested, “Maybe you’ll take Saucerhead along?”
I didn’t take Saucerhead. I didn’t need any help. I was just going to chat with a teenage girl.
I didn’t take anybody but me because I sold myself the notion that Marengo North English was committed to an old-fashioned, rigidly fair way of doing things.
So I fooled myself. Eagerness to meet Emerald Jenn didn’t take me anywhere near Marengo North English. The estate belonged to the character who had sent his pals to roust me, a fact I could have determined had I bothered to do a little homework before hitting the trail. One Elias Davenport owned The Tops. Elias Davenport thought Marengo North English was a candyass who was just pussyfooting around the human rights thing. Elias was ready to act.
I didn’t listen when Slither told me who brought Emerald’s invitation.
Getting onto the grounds of The Tops wasn’t a problem. Managing a sit-down with Emerald was a little more trouble.
Silly me. I thought they’d let me see her, get me out of their hair, forget the whole thing. I had no idea they were out of control.
I figured it out, though.
The guys who smiled me through the manor gate shed their senses of humor when the gate chunked shut. Their eyes got mean. They kept on grinning, but the only part of the joke they wanted to share was the punchline. Kidney high.
The guys who’d visited my place ambled out of the shrubbery. Didn’t look like their manners had improved.
They made me so nervous I hit them back first, shielded by the spell that put me out of focus to anybody trying to concentrate on me. Damn, that was a neat one! They hopped and flailed and swung and cussed and missed me like a bunch of drunks. Meanwhile, I was hard at work with my mystical head-knocker, scattering unconscious bodies. Davenport’s gardeners were going to be busy picking up fertilizer for a while.
I amazed myself. But we’re all capable of amazing behavior once we’re adequately motivated.
The Davenport mansion couldn’t be seen from the gate. I undertook an odyssey across vast expanses of manicured lawn, maneuvering between sculpted shrubs and trees. Almost got lost in a maze created from hedges. Gawked my way through an incredible formal flower garden, thinking half the people of the Bustee slum (every one a human) could’ve supported themselves farming that ground.
The Davenport place was enough to kindle revolutionary fervor in a stone. Something about it shrieked contempt for every race.
I didn’t march up to the door and hazard the mercies of another Ichabod. Once I spied the main house I resorted to my old recon training. I sneaked and hustled and lurked and tiptoed till I got to the rear of the house. There were plenty of people around and plenty saw me, but they were cringing characters wearing tattered Venageti military apparel. They were employed at such socially useful tasks as trimming grass with scissors. They pretended blindness. I returned the favor, didn’t see their humiliation.
Never had I thought prisoners of war might be reduced to this. Not that I had any love for the Venageti. You got people chasing you through the swamps, trying to kill you, making you eat snakes and bugs to stay alive, you won’t develop much sympathy if they stumble later. Still, there was an essential wrongness about their situation. And the core of it, I suspected, was that Elias Davenport wouldn’t distinguish between vanquished foes and the “lower orders” of Karentines.
Elias must have had him a cushy desk mission far from the fighting back when he was serving his kingdom. Most ruling-class types get out to the killing grounds and discover that when they’re cut they bleed the same as any farmboy or kid from the Bustee. “Sharp steel don’t got no respect,” one of my sergeants used to say, wearing a big-ass grin.
I found a back door that wasn’t locked or guarded. Why bother? Who was going to do a break-in in this loony nest? Who would dare discomfit Elias Davenport?
(The name was a cipher to me at that point.)
I don’t mind folks being stinking rich. I’d like to get there someday myself, have me a little hundred-room shack on a thousand acres well stocked with hot and cold running redheads and maybe a pipeline direct from Weider’s brewery. But I expect everybody to get there the same way I would: by busting their butts, not by burying some ancestor, then raising their noses.
I know. It’s a simpleminded outlook. I’m a simple guy. Work as hard as I need to, look out for my friends, do a little good here and there. Try not to hurt anybody needlessly.
That house was a house of pain. You couldn’t help feeling that as soon as you stepped inside. Sorrow and hurt were in its bones. The house now shaped its inhabitants as much as they shaped it.
You find houses like that, old places possessed of their own souls, good or evil, happy or sad.
This was a house possessed by disturbing silence.
It should have had its own heartbeat, like a living thing, echoing comings and goings, creaking and rattling and thumping with the slamming of distant doors. But there were no sounds. The house seemed as empty as a discarded shoe—or Maggie Jenn’s place up on the Hill.
Spooky!
I started thinking trap. I mean, those guys had been ready at the gate. A minute stalling around while somebody ran to the house, supposedly for permission, then they were all over me.
Was I expected to get past them? Was I supposed to walk into . . . what?
I grinned.
Saucerhead says I think too much. Saucerhead is right. Once you commit, you’d better give up the what-ifs and soul-searchings, do your deed and scoot.
I moved into the silence carefully, wearing a renewed grin. If I ever name my jobs, this one would have to be the Case of the Burglar Who Was the Good Guy. I was sneaking into every place I came to.
Not that I wanted it that way. People made me.
I didn’t have the strength to lift my eyes in search of the source of the voice that said, “You’re a resourceful fellow, Mr. Garrett. And remarkably adept with a truncheon.” The speaker had the nasal drawl of an old-line aristocrat, scion of a lineage dangling down from the age of empire.
I barely retained the presence to wonder what had happened. One moment I’m trying to conjure a good rationale for my breaking and entering habit, the next I’m in a cold red place of echoes, tied into a hard chair, limp as a wet towel. No mental effort, however mighty, supplied details of intervening events.
“Pay attention, Mr. Garrett. Otto.”
Fingers ungently buried themselves in my hair. The helpful presumptive Otto yanked my head back so I could do my blurry-eyed mouth-breather act in full view of a guy on some kind of elevated seat. He was just a terrible silhouette against a scarlet background.
I was too dizzy to be scared. But I was hard at work trying to get control of my head so I could be. I recognized my surroundings from whispers about it by some less than sane acquaintances connected with the Call. I was in the star chamber of the Holy Vehm, the court of honor of the Call. Not being an active member, I had to assume I stood accused of being a traitor to my race. Only . . .
The way I’d heard, there were supposed to be three judges. The spook in the high seat should’ve been the meat in a lunatic sandwich.
I focused my whole being on my tongue. “What the hell is going on?” I don’t know why I bothered after the first few words. They all came out in a language even I didn’t understand. But I’m an optimist. I kept trying. “I just came here to interview Emerald Jenn.” Had I been given the tongue of a dwarf while I was out?
“It takes the spell a while to wear off, lord,” a voice announced from behind me.
Can a silhouette glower? This one did. “I am aware of that fact, Otah.” Otah? Like in Otto pronounced backward?
I sagged again. A hearty yank on my hair helped me stay focused on the silhouette. A guy started slapping rny cheeks. That helped, too.
Oh, heavens. Another guy stepped in to help the first. He was an exact copy of the other. Identical twin thugs? This concept was too bizarre. Time to wake up.
I woke up but only to find identical cretins waling on my face. My tongue had lost its skill at dwarvish. I began to render opinions in only mildly accented Karentine. And my mind raced far ahead of my laggard tongue. “Do you realize to whom you are speaking?” the silhouette demanded. The guy sounded put out.
“I did, I could’ve said something more specific about angles of approach and velocities of insertion.”
The silhouette snapped, “Control your vulgarity, Mr. Garrett. You broke into my home.”
“I was invited. To see Emerald Jenn.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”
“She not around? Then I’d better be going.”
Davenport chuckled. He must have done well at crackpot villain school because he brought it up from the pit, full of evil promise. “Nonsense, Mr. Garrett. Really.” He gave me another chuckle just as good as the first. “Where are the books?”
“Huh?”
“Where are the books?”
Uh-oh. “What the hell you talking about?” I never thought anybody would ask me.
“Do you think me naive, Mr. Garrett?”
“I think you’re a raving lunatic.” Pow! Right in the chops. Chaz was going to have to do without a kiss next time we ran into each other. I guess Otto or Otah didn’t agree with me.
I also thought Davenport was a damned fool. He’d made the same mistake the Rainmaker’s thugs had back in the dawn of time, when they hadn’t emptied my pockets. His boys were fools, too, because they hadn’t bothered to check. Davenport wouldn’t have risked breaking a nail touching me himself.
I had my stuff.
I just needed to get to it. Nothing to that. Once I shed the twelve nautical miles of rope cocooning me.
“Where are the books?”
“Give me a clue, Bonzo. What the hell you talking about?”
“Otto.”
Pow!
As the constellations faded I suffered an idea. It wasn’t the best I’d ever had. It was going to hurt.
Typical Garrett plan.
“The books, Mr. Garrett. Unaltered first editions of When No Ravens Went Hungry. Where are they?”
“Ah. Those books. I don’t have the faintest.” Could he have been behind the wrecking of Penny and Robin?
“I don’t believe you.”
“You want to sell me the idea a jerk as stinking rich as you needs to bust people up and kill them and steal old books over a treasure as puny as Eagle’s?”
“The record says that treasure consisted entirely of silver, Mr. Garrett. To accomplish its purpose, the Call needs that silver.”
I lost my focus as I intuited the nature of his interest. He meant to become the boss crackdome.
Silver was the fuel of sorcery. Black magic lurked behind the Call. Maybe the silver shortage was holding the Call back more than was any excess of reason, humanity, or common decency. Maybe the guy who brought the silver in would own the Call. And maybe whoever ran the Call would own the kingdom if the lunatics got their racist revolution rolling.
“Marengo North English tell you to find it?”
Elias Davenport said nothing for a moment, which confirmed what I’d guessed. Then, still not speaking, he came after me. He didn’t exactly bound my way, though, and when he stepped into a better light I saw why. He was probably around when Eagle sneaked off with his slaves.
He had a bulging, throbbing vein in his left temple. I suggested, “Don’t have a stroke, old-timer.”
Shucks. He didn’t. He just got really mad. He made a gesture that must have meant punch Garrett in the face till you turn him inside out because the twins really went to work.
Felt great when they took a break. Gave me a chance to spit the blood out and suck some air.
“Where are the missing pages, Mr. Garrett?” Davenport was shrieking now.
Yep, it sure wasn’t the cleverest idea I ever had and it sure did hurt. I decided I’d strung them along long enough. “Shirt. Pocket,” I gurgled. “Box. Key. To house.”
Davenport was right in my face, gagging me with foul breath caused by rotten teeth. He was so eager he didn’t wait to hear the story I’d rehearsed. He pawed my shirtfront, found the box I wanted him to find, snatched it, and stumbled toward his high chair. Or whatever he called it.
My ears rang like church gongs, but I still heard the buzz when the whatever in the box woke up. The twins heard it, too. “Please be careful, lord!” one squealed. “There’s something wrong . . . ”
Davenport fumbled the box open. I knew when because he screamed to let me know.
If I hadn’t hurt so bad I might have felt sorry for him, such was the agony and despair in his shrieking.
One of the twins squeezed my throat. “You better make it stop . . . ” He went to work on his own screams before he made his point. That aggravated his backward named brother, who stepped up to maul me, only just as he reached for me he got a big look of surprise and started howling himself.
I never did see what got them. They’d tied me up real good. I do know the uproar attracted people from elsewhere because I heard new voices rushing around asking what the hell was going on. Then some of those started screaming, too. Their shrieks left the star chamber and dwindled.
Circumstances being what they were, I couldn’t do much but sit around plotting my next move. Despite my discomfort I even fell asleep (I’m too tough to pass out) for a while. Probably a long while, though in such situations the whiles tend to stretch longer than they really are. I doubt more than a couple months passed in the outside world.
My big worry was the killer bug coming back, but when sounds disturbed my nap I learned that I had more immediate troubles.
“Got yourself in it real deep this time, Garrett.” Winger strolled around me while her boyfriend watched from a distance. This was my fault. I’d made it possible for him to track me again. But I’d had my reasons. They just didn’t make much sense now.
Winger wasn’t suffering from any overwhelming passion to set me free, so I didn’t act like I was as aware as I was. I was confident that Otto and Otah had left me looking well done. I turned loose a moan that didn’t take much acting.
“Think he told them anything?” the boyfriend asked.
“What? How? He don’t know anything.”
The boyfriend grunted but sounded unconvinced. But he’d been on my tail closer than Winger had.
Winger grabbed my hair, lifted my head. “You in there, Garrett? Where did everybody go? Where did you send them?”
“Hon? Wrong question,” the boyfriend said. He was over by the judge seats now. “Ask him what he did to them.”
Winger went to check what was left of Elias Davenport. “What would do that?” She glanced back at me nervously.
“I don’t think I want to find out,” the boyfriend said. “There are more over there. Four, maybe five. All torn up the same way.”
“What did you do, Garrett?” Winger actually seemed concerned. Like maybe she was worried I might do it again. Maybe she was getting old.
I noticed that nobody was straining to get me loose yet. Winger asked, “They have all three books, Garrett? Or just the one the girl took from her mother?”
I wondered if I could lure her close enough to bite her.
“Hon!”
I couldn’t turn, but I heard them come into the chamber, at least four men. Maybe more. Things froze. Winger was at a loss for what to do. I wondered why.
“Holy hooters! Looka them gazoombies!”
The Goddamned Parrot! What the hell?
Slither moved across my field of vision. For reasons known only to him he was lugging a military entrenching tool. He brandished it at Winger but didn’t say anything.
Next thing I knew Morley was lifting my head, looking into what little could be seen of my eyes behind the swelling. “He’s alive. Get him untied.” A second later, Ivy and Spud went to work on the ropes holding me. They didn’t seem to be in any hurry, though. “Saucerhead. Cover that door. Sarge, get that one over there. Looks like they went that way when they ran.” He lifted my head again. “What happened?”
“Mimble sif cubby bunka snot!” Oh, damn! I was speaking fluent dwarvish again. Courtesy of my swollen face and tongue. But this time I knew what I was trying to say.
The Goddamned Parrot definitely possessed a working man’s taste in femininity. And he wasn’t going to let Winger get away without hearing about it.
She and her boyfriend were making sure they didn’t do anything to get anybody upset.
Ivy and Spud kept fumbling and I kept trying to tell them not to be so thoughtful of the ropes, just haul out a knife and hack away. They didn’t understand me, though. They kept doing it the hard way till Morley snapped, “We don’t have any call to be careful of property, Narcisio. The owner is over here full of holes. A prosecutor won’t worry about a damaged rope.”
Saucerhead scolded Winger. Spud and Ivy tried to get me to stand. Morley faked looking like my well-being was the only thing of any interest to him. Slither wandered around muttering and waving his shovel. Sarge studied the expanse of his belly, maybe contemplating drawing a map.
Somebody somewhere shrieked in pain, somebody not there in the chamber but not real far away. Then another somebody screamed. Then we heard a furious buzzing, getting louder. My pet was coming back.
That fool Slither chuckled like this was what he’d been waiting for all his life, like he’d finally found his chance to use that killer comeback he’d thought of fourteen years ago. He told Sarge, “Better get outa the way, Ace, ’less you want it coming right through you.”
Sarge took a peek at the bodies. He opted for discretion and cleared the doorway fast.
An instant later, something came through that doorway so fast it was barely a blur on a course that curved right toward me.
Slither swung his shovel. He stepped into it, got his arms extended and all his arm and shoulder strength into his swing.
Splang!
He dropped the blade of his tool to the floor and began cleaning it with the edge of his sole. His grin was huge. “There’s how you handle them little boogers. They’re fast and they’re mean, but you can handle them easy if you just don’t take your eye off them. I guess nobody around here must’ve seen them before.”
Morley asked me, “Will you be able to walk?” He left Slither’s strokes to the others.
I tried to ask the big guy where he’d run into those devil bugs before. Only dwarvish came out. Morley thought I was talking to him. “Good,” he said. “You’re tougher than you let on. Let’s get out of here.”
A good idea. After making sure nothing got left that would implicate any of us. Though I couldn’t see how it would be possible for some of us not to be connected somehow. There were live people in the house still, and the POWs outside could be forced to reveal whatever they had seen.
Winger and her pal tried to turn sideways and thereby become invisible, but as TG Parrot reminds us occasionally, Winger in profile is hard to miss.
“We can leave you here,” Morley told her. “There is ample rope now.” He indicated the chrysallis I’d left behind.
“No. No. That’s all right.” Winger didn’t want to stay. It was likely the weather would turn real nasty soon. The Call wouldn’t know that Davenport had gone rogue. They would want a blood price paid.
It was all my fault. I admit it. If I’d been able to shuffle my feet faster, we might not have had to play in the rest of the game.
We never cleared the star chamber. I mean, I was heeling and toeing as fast as my heels and toes would cooperate, but we just didn’t get far.
Morley howled suddenly. That startled the rest of us into freezing. Another bug? I thought. How? . . . Dotes leapt into the air. As he peaked out, a guy stepped into the chamber and presented his chin for kicking. He dropped like his legs had been cut off, but a whole herd of brunos stormed in over him. He was going to have bruises on his bruises and powdered bones if he ever came around.
Everybody but me got into the mix-up. Ivy and Spud propped me against a wall and jumped into it. I stood there so focused on trying not to fall that I had little attention left for rooting for my pals. I did try fishing something useful out of my pockets, but the effort was too much for what meager energy I had left.
I didn’t even realize who this bunch were till Mugwump appeared amid the second wave. By then things had grown too serious to be settled amicably. We had dead and bad hurt people everywhere, mostly on the Rainmaker’s side, but poor addlepate Ivy made a wrong move and accidentally got himself stabbed in the back about forty-five times. The Goddamned Parrot ripped the scalp off the character responsible, a ratman so weeded up he couldn’t stop stabbing long enough to brush the bird off his head.
Slither picked Mugwump up and tossed him about forty yards, then headed for the Rainmaker, who had just made his appearance, had spotted Saucerhead already headed his way, and was concentrating on evading that behemoth. Then Cleaver saw Slither coming, squealed and ducked between the two big men. I wondered where he had managed to find so many brunos stupid enough to work for him, what with everybody in TunFaire out to buy his head. Maybe he put on his girl disguise and let them think they were working for a woman.
His thugs sure were disconcerted when they recognized my friends.
Slither was altogether too determined to pay Cleaver back for Ivy and his own old grievances. He threw pieces of people right and left as he stormed after the Rainmaker, but he never quite caught up and he didn’t keep an eye out behind him. I tried to yell, but my yeller was out of action. Just as he grabbed the raving runt somebody stuck a dagger in his spine. I would have cried for him if I could. Instead, I spent my last reserve to bawl, “Powziffle pheez!”
Slither was a dead man, but he didn’t let that slow him down. Nobody he could reach enjoyed the experience. He broke Morley’s arm. All Morley was trying to do was get out of his way.
I tried to get my feet moving toward a doorway, but they just wouldn’t cooperate. Davenport’s headbusters must have given me something more than a beating. I had a bad feeling I wasn’t going to make a getaway the way I had at the Bledsoe, even with Slither demolishing the unenthusiastic crowd Cleaver had brought.
I did reflect that everyone who’d ever trailed me seemed to have come to the Tops. I guess everybody thought I was about to glom the mystic trilogy.
About the time Slither wound down, one of the Rainmaker’s thugs got a knife into Winger’s boyfriend. She had a blood fit, jumped some guys trying to get away. They didn’t make it.
I glanced around. It looked like Winger and Grange Cleaver were the only players not hurt. Saucerhead was leaning against a wall, looking pale. Sarge was down, but I couldn’t tell how badly he was injured. Spud, with T.G. Parrot on his back, cussing, was on hands and knees not having much luck getting back up. Morley, despite his injury, was making sure none of Cleaver’s thugs ever inconvenienced him again.
Looked to me like the whole thing had been a blood sacrifice in aid of nothing. Nobody profited and a lot of people lost big.
I was proud of myself. With a little help from my pal the wall I was making headway toward a door.
Movement took all my concentration. I had to stop to catch up on the struggle.
Things had not gone well. The floor was littered with bad guys, but the good guys had vanished. Unless you counted the Goddamned Parrot, who swooped around exercising the slime end of his vocabulary. I wanted to yell for Morley or Winger or somebody, but my yeller was out of commission.
Cleaver was still upright. So was Mugwump, mainly because he was so wide he rolled back upright whenever somebody knocked him over. Slither had had the right idea: just hurl him through the wall.
Where were my pals?
Ducking somebody else’s pals?
I was moving again when Cleaver and Mugwump got to me, just as yet another gang of players plunged into this pool of insanity.
I recognized one, Belinda’s specialist, Cleland Justin Carlyle. I assumed his companions were Outfit heavyweights, too.
Now I knew why my friends had disappeared.
Carlyle and his buddies had blood in their eyes. Events at the Jenn house had to be avenged. Somebody messes with syndicate guys, somebody has to pay. Didn’t matter then much who.
Mugwump grabbed me by the shirtfront. He snagged Cleaver with his other hand. He hauled us both to a door. I don’t know what he was thinking. I guess he was a little distressed. He chucked Cleaver through, held me a second, rasped, “Even, fella,” and chucked me, too.
Into some damned hidey-hole behind the ever-loving thrones of the lunatic judges of the Call. Not through an exit.
Mugwump made a whole lot of noise negotiating with the boys from the Outfit. Then the debate ended. Utter silence filled the universe . . . unless you counted the sonofabitching Goddamned Parrot, who wouldn’t shut up if you drowned him.
Everybody else had left him behind. Maybe I could work it that way, too.
Not bloody likely. Not with my luck. The gods probably had me whipped up on like this just so I couldn’t shed that talking feather duster.
It was real tight in that closet. It hadn’t been intended to take two people. It hadn’t been intended to take two people of the sorts we were.
Well, Mugwump had put me close enough to Cleaver to choke him, which is where I’d wanted to be for a while. But I didn’t have the strength.
The squabble between the parrot and sanity continued as I blurted, “Get your hands off me!” I suppose prowlers nearby, possessed of sharp ears, might have heard. Might have understood, too. My diction was improving. “I don’t play your game.”
Cleaver giggled.
And I blushed red enough to glow in the dark. Because Cleaver’s movements had nothing to do with me. Sometimes the man did dumb stuff, but only a total damnfool would make a pass with slavering cutthroats stalking around looking to chop him into beagle chow.
“Garrett, you’re a wonder.” That was the voice of Maggie Jenn, sizzling like a red hot poker. “Maybe I will lay hands on. If we get out of here.”
“Back off!” I barked.
He backed. But his Maggie voice chuckled wickedly. Evil, evil person. A moment later, he became all business. “You have your strength back?”
“They gave me something. I’m not going to be any good for anything for a long time.”
“We have to step out of here sometime. And I don’t have so much as a nail file.”
I said “Fooey!” which is dwarvish for “Oh, shit!” Getting out was a significant goal. Out of the closet—out of that closet, damn it!—out of the Tops, maybe even out of the province for a while, all seemed attractive goals. The mess here was beyond any cover-up now.
The closet door whipped open.
Light poured in. It nearly blinded me. I could barely make out the silhouette of somebody short and impatient. The Goddamn Parrot swooped past, cussing.
“Get out of there!” a hard voice snapped. I shuddered—then recognized the voice.
“Relway?”
“Yes.” The little halfbreed secret policeman was curt always, impatient forever. “Move it.”
“I wondered if you or the firelord’s men would turn up.”
“Direheart’s guy was the first one here: you. And I find you in a closet with some bimbo in yet another place where we’re gonna need wagons to haul the stiffs off.”
Relway’s men helped us out of the closet. They were particularly solicitous of the bimbo.
I covered my surprise. They said Cleaver was a master of disguise. Here was proof. That bit of wiggling in the dark had been him rearranging his clothing and donning a black wig. He looked like the devil woman lurking around many a man’s fantasies.
Relway said, “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for who owns this place. Block kowtows to the panjas, but I . . . ” He stopped before he wasted half an hour on a favorite gripe.
“Panjas. I haven’t heard them called that since I was a kid.”
“Call me old-fashioned. What’s your story, Garrett?”
“The girl I’m looking for was supposed to be here. I got a letter supposedly from her. Wanted me to come talk. I came. Some thugs grabbed me, I woke up here drugged to the gills, tied into a chair. They started asking questions that made no sense. Then a bunch of people busted in, there was a fight, somebody cut me loose maybe figuring I was one of their guys. I headed for cover since I wasn’t in any shape to help myself.”
He seemed somewhat less than convinced that I was telling the whole story. Can’t figure why. He showed no interest in Cleaver and didn’t ask questions about known associates of one Garrett who might have been seen lurking.
I asked, “Why is Elias Davenport of interest?”
“He’s a lunatic panja who makes the rest of the Call look like a social club. He’s behind most of the rioting. What kind of magic did they use?”
“Magic?”
“Something made a lot of corpses. Put holes right through them. No weapon will do that.”
“Didn’t play no favorites, neither, Lieutenant,” one of Relway’s men observed. Relway grunted.
I said, “I never got a good look, but I thought it was a giant bug. Some guy took it out by whacking it with a shovel.” Said guy and his guilty tool weren’t lying all that far away. Relway stepped over for a moment, scowled down.
He asked, “You get what you came for?”
“Hell, no! Never saw her. I came straight here. Wherever here is—I never saw the in-between.”
Again Relway’s look said he lacked conviction in his acceptance of my tale. People just don’t take your word anymore. “That so? I’ll be busy picking up the pieces here now. I’ll want to talk later. Meantime, you might report to the firelord. I have a feeling he’s uncomfortable with the bloodshed that follows you.”
“I can go?”
“Just don’t go so far I can’t find you.”
“Perish the thought.” I tried to recall old war buddies who lived outcountry and might put me up.
“Garrett.”
I stopped oozing toward the doorway. “Yeah?”
“Unusual mix of stiffs. You happen to notice who brought them in here?” His tone and expression suggested his thoughts were on a plane not even vaguely connected to my own.
“Not really. Not that I recognized.”
“Any centaurs? Anyone with an unusual accent?”
“Huh?” He really was somewhere else.
“You see anybody might have been a refugee from the Cantard?”
“Not that I knew was. Why? What’s up?”
“There’s cause to think the refugees have organized for their own protection. Directed by fugitive Mooncalled officers.”
“Oh.” Now wouldn’t that be the bloom on the rose? TunFaire hiding Glory Mooncalled’s survivors. “Interesting notion.” Relway would give it up as soon as he identified a few bodies.
I resumed traveling. I made sure I kept a deathgrip on my bimbo. And a close watch on her free hand, lest it dart into her bosom in search of some equalizer.
Cleaver always had a fallback.
Looked like Relway had brought the secret police cavalry brigade. Must have been ten thousand horses outside the manor house. Every damned one gave up tearing up property to glare malice my way. I limped and lumbered in between police equipment carts and made my getaway before they could get organized.
They aren’t so bright. If you catch them by surprise, you can get the best of them.
A guy had passed me while I was creaking up the stair from Davenport’s cellar. He must have given the word I was free to go. Hardly anyone even bothered to notice me, except a few vaguely familiar guys who nodded.
Cleaver kept his lip buttoned till we were far from anybody who might listen in. “That was nice, Garrett. You could’ve ratted me out.”
“I didn’t do you any favor.”
“I didn’t think so, but I wanted to check.” He made a feeble attempt to get away. You could almost hear him sorting options.
I glanced back. Those horses had decided to let me go. This time. They seemed nervous, preoccupied. Weird, considering this was a chance to hoof me some major grief.
Cleaver sensed my unease. “What’s up?”
“Something weird here.”
“You just noticed?” That in a Maggie voice.
“Besides our weirdness. Walk faster.” I smelled politics. Relway was around. Relway’s world didn’t encompass good guys and bad. Heads there didn’t get busted for profit but for the power to make people do what they were told rather than what they wanted.
I let myself become distracted. Cleaver tried to yank my arm out by the roots. He got loose. I chugged after him, running weakly. The front gate came in sight. The little villain was gaining when he went through. I kept on plugging. I could outlast him. I was used to running.
Galoop, galoop, I turned into the lane. And, behold, there was my pal Grange Cleaver, passing the time of day, ducking around and betwixt Morley, Sarge, and Spud, who were trying to surround him. Sarge and Spud seemed to be in moods as dark as mine. Morley, though, was grinning like a croc about to pounce on a not very bright wild pig.
Cleaver chopped him on the bum wing. He yelped. Cleaver pranced past and darted away.
“Hi,” I puffed.
Morley said a few things. Surprised me. Spoke quite fluent profanity when he wanted. Then he added, “Your luck with girls never improves, does it! Even that kind runs away.”
“He bet he could beat me back to town. I was gaining on him.” There was no hope of catching Cleaver now.
“Of course you were.”
“Where’s Mr. Big, Mr. Garrett?” Spud rasped. The kid was putting on a show of boldly standing up to his pain.
“Damn! It’s silver lining time.” I glanced back at the gate. “If we’re lucky, by now Relway has taken all the beak he can stand and he’s twisted its fowl head off.”
The kid glared daggers.
I asked Morley, “You going to be all right?”
“I’m giving up cartwheels. Listen. Somebody coming.”
Turned out to be a lot of somebodies.
We faded into the woods opposite the Tops before another troop of Guards arrived, their mounts acting spooky. “Those look like regular cavalry,” Morley whispered.
Did to me, too. “Relway is putting on a big show.” I wondered if maybe there wasn’t something to his paranoia.
“We better scat,” Sarge suggested. “ ’Fore they get so thick we cain’t move.”
Good idea.
“Not yet,” Morley said.
Baffled, Sarge asked, “How come you want to hang out?”
Good question. We couldn’t do ourselves any good.
“I’m waiting for Tharpe.”
“He all right?” I asked.
“Was.”
“How long we gonna . . . ?”
“I’ll let you know, Sarge. Garrett!”
I’d begun shaking, had lost focus. I had passed beyond the immediacy of the moment and had time to reflect on what I’d lived through. And on the fact that a couple of mentally handicapped guys hadn’t made it . . . “What?”
“You’re the healthiest. Go watch for Saucerhead.”
I sighed. I wanted to go home. I wanted to put myself to bed and sleep a week, till the pain and guilt were gone. Then I could get shut of this life. I could see Weider, tell him I was ready to take that full-time security job. They don’t drug you and torture you and kill your friends at the brewery—and you’re never far from a beer.
I found me a nice spot and settled to watch the manor gate.
I’d been there just seconds when buzzing flies and an odd odor grabbed my attention. Well. Fresh horse apples. And horsehair in the bark of a nearby tree. I looked around. Leaves on the ground had been turned. I found the impression of a shod hoof smaller than that of any riding horse. The shoe style would be recognized by anyone who had served in the Cantard.
It was a centaur’s shoe.
The impression wasn’t clear enough to tell me which tribe, but that didn’t matter. What did matter was that a centaur had been watching the manor gate from this same spot until very recently.
The ugly angles grew heavier by the minute. I wanted away. None of this stuff out here had anything to do with me and my troubles.
That misbegotten Saucerhead. He didn’t bother using the gate even though there was nobody there to contest it. He came over the wall, down the lane. I noticed when a major tree branch suddenly dipped its chin in the dust. It popped when Tharpe let loose.
He was carrying somebody.
How does the man do these things? He isn’t human. I limped over. “What you got?” Like I hadn’t figured it out at first glance.
Her mother had told me that she looked like her only with less wear. I promise you, Maggie Jenn turned them to stone in her day. The kid made it plain why Teddy went goofy back when.
“Spotted her when we was sneaking out. I figured it wasn’t right we went to all that trouble, so many folks got hurt, you didn’t get a crack at what started it all.”
His shirt wiggled, heaved. Something made an ugly noise. I had a bad feeling.
Saucerhead worsened it immediately. “Oh. Yeah. I brung your bird. I stuffed him in my shirt on account of he wouldn’t shut up.”
I brandished a fist at the sky.
The breeze in the boughs sounded like divine snickers.
Saucerhead asked, “You want the bird or the girl?”
“Looks like I got the bird already.”
“To carry.” He did understand, though. “The chit, she don’t really want to come.”
“No. And you with your sweet tongue.”
She hadn’t said anything yet. She didn’t now but did flash me a cold look that made me glad she couldn’t do what she was thinking.
“Give me the talking feather duster. I can’t manage anything bigger.”
“Suit yourself.” Saucerhead had kept the girl on his shoulder, sack of grain style. He asked her, “You want to walk? Or do I got to keep carrying you?”
She didn’t answer. Saucerhead shrugged. He hardly noticed her weight.
The others joined us, drawn by our voices. Spud fussed over the bird. Morley had rigged himself some crude splints. I gestured at the parrot. “My pal had to do me a favor.”
Morley tried to chuckle. Pain got in the way. I asked, “Can you manage?”
“Just won’t play bowls this week.”
“Poor Julie.”
“We’ll work something out.” He offered a glimpse of his wicked grin. “Let’s roll. Before Relway realizes he’s played it wrong and wants us to explain.”
“What happened to Winger? Anybody see?”
Nobody had but Morley opined, “She got away. She has her own guardian angels.”
“She gets Relway after her she’ll need them.” We walked as fast as we could with wounds and burdens, the Goddamn Parrot denouncing the whole bleeding world for all the indignities he’d suffered. Even Spud’s patience became strained.
Sarge sneered, “Least it ain’t blamin’ everythin’ on you no more, Garrett.”
Morley eyed that jungle chicken like he was considering abandoning the vegetarian life-style. I told him, “Thank Saucerhead. I left it for Relway. They’re perfect for each other.”
Nobody laughed. Sourpusses.
“Was that the Rainmaker you was chasing back there?” Saucerhead asked. He spat a wad of sourgrass he’d been chewing. He remained indifferent to Emerald’s weight.
“Yeah.”
“That runt? Hey!” The girl was wiggling. “Knock it off.” He swatted her bottom. “I always thought the Rainmaker had to be nine feet tall.”
“With hooves and horns. I know. I was disappointed, too.”
Morley snickered. “He sure was.” I gave him a dirty look. He never let up, pain or no pain.
I lost the election. My place got picked for the human reassembly party. Morley hinted that he didn’t want word of his injury getting out right away. He didn’t want the wolves smelling blood before he was ready.
I bought it. He has his enemies.
I had trouble getting comfortable. My home contained too many reminders of Slither and Ivy.
“It wasn’t right,” I told Eleanor. “They didn’t deserve it.” I listened momentarily. My kitchen had become an infirmary. Saucerhead had recruited a defrocked doctor who imagined himself a crusty town character. He reeked of alcohol and hadn’t stumbled against soap or a razor for weeks so I guess he qualified.
“Yeah, I know,” I told Eleanor. “Life don’t make sense, it ain’t fair and don’t ever ask the gods for dramatic unity. But I don’t have to like it. Got any idea what I should do with the girl?”
Emerald was confined in Dean’s room. She hadn’t delivered a word yet. She wouldn’t believe me when I said I wasn’t on her mom’s payroll.
Could be she didn’t care if I wasn’t. You snatch some people, they never do warm up.
Eleanor had no suggestions. I said, “I’d cut her loose if there weren’t people out there who’d jump all over her.” Eleanor did not disapprove. “Speaking of whom, I wonder how long it’ll be before Winger turns up with one of her outstanding stories?”
I was looking forward to that.
Morley howled. There was a crash. I headed for the kitchen. Dotes began threatening bloodshed. “Not in my kitchen!” I yelled. I stopped to check on the Dead Man.
A bug darted across his cheek, hid behind his proboscis. If Dean didn’t get home soon, I was going to have to clean him up myself. Maybe I’d bring him some flowers. He used to like bouquets.
The Goddamn Parrot started yelling louder than Morley. I told the Dead Man, “You’re not earning your keep.”
It wasn’t pretty in the kitchen. All that whimpering and whining. The doc had finished, though. He was under an inverted wine bottle, using a half pint to clear his palate. I made a face. Even ratmen shunned the stuff he was swilling. “You all going to live?”
“No thanks to that butcher,” Morley snarled.
Saucerhead asked, “You ever see him act like such a baby?”
“You oversized . . . If brains were fire you couldn’t burn your own house down.” He jumped up on a chair and started ranting like some Holy Roller soul-scavenger.
I asked Sarge, “The doc give him something?”
Sarge shrugged. “Come on, boss. Give Doc a break. He fixed your arm. And he ain’t been getting much work since they cut him loose from the Bledsoe.”
No wonder he was drinking bottom of the barrel. He was bottom stuff himself . . . I glanced at Saucerhead. Doc must be some relative of his new lady.
Surly but silent, Morley paid his fees. Spud didn’t look much happier. I decided to get the old boy out while Dotes was feeling generous. I got hold of Doc’s arm and pulled.
“You really get the boot at the Bledsoe?” Hard to imagine that as possible, yet I’d met two such in just a few days.
“I drink a bit, son.”
“No.”
“Steadied my hands when I was young, chopping off arms and legs down in the Cantard, couple lifetimes ago. Don’t work anymore, though. Barley kills the pain now.”
He stepped outside, cloaked himself in what dignity he retained, started down to the street, stumbled, fell the last two steps. On her stoop, Mrs. Cardonlos paused to glare and nod to herself. I blew her a kiss. I studied the street.
It was hard to tell, but I thought I saw a few folks who didn’t ring right.
Again? Or still? I eyed Mrs. Cardonlos again. Her being out on point might mean she expected further proof that Garrett was a peril to the neighborhood.
I shut the door, thoughtful.
I had an idea.
I headed for the kitchen. “Saucerhead, want to run an errand?” I showed him some shiny copper.
“Talked me into it, you smoothie. What?”
“Give me a minute. I need to write a letter.”
At last the house was quiet. The mob was away. The Goddamn Parrot had a full crop and was sleeping. I was in my office sharing the silence with Eleanor.
Naturally, somebody came to the door.
“My answer from Chaz.” Or maybe Winger, if her creative side was hot.
I was hoping she had a block.
I used the peephole.
Got it right first guess. Mr. W. Tharpe with mail.
I leaned into the gloom of the Dead Man’s room. Vermin scurried. I told him, “I’m off. And she’s the most beautiful blonde you never saw. Don’t wait up.”
He didn’t wish me luck.
I left the house without so much as a passing thought about the gorgeous redhead stashed upstairs.
It was the best table in the place but still only the Joy House. You do business with a world-class sorcerer, you can be a little more comfortable doing it on familiar ground.
Conscious of their bid to go upscale, Morley and his thugs were on their best behavior. Puddle even donned a clean shirt and tucked it in.
The Firelord had dressed down. Excellent. I didn’t want casual acquaintances getting nervous because of my contact with him.
He looked like a big old dock walloper.
With him dressed down and Chaz dressed up, nobody paid him much attention. Even I had trouble concentrating. “Excuse me?”
“I said I’m serving my own interests.”
I recalled now. I’d thanked him for not making a show. “Oh.”
“Believe it or not, there are people who might do me an injury if they caught me off my usual range.”
“Really?” My gaze swerved back to Chaz. The woman had dressed to kill and was armed with her best assassin’s smile.
“Hard to believe, right? Big old cuddle bear like me?” He turned to Morley, who hovered at the head of a platoon of ready servers. “I’m not real hungry tonight. I’ll take half pound of roast beef rare, sides of mutton, and pork. No fruits or vegetables.”
Morley went paler than a blanching vampire. He nodded sharply, once, some postmortem spasm. He fish-eyed me and my grin. His eyes were the lamps of hell. I decided not to rub it in.
I ordered one of the more palatable house specialties. Chaz followed my lead.
Morley stamped toward the kitchen, dragging Puddle, muttering orders. I wondered which neighboring establishment would subcontract Direheart’s order.
I fought the chuckles as I brought the firelord up to date.
“You let him get away?”
“I didn’t let. Let wasn’t part of the equation. He got. You want, I’ll take you to see him after supper.”
Good Old Fred raised both eyebrows. But then he came after me about the centaur sign outside The Tops. His intensity confirmed my suspicions. He’d had definite reasons for coming home from the Cantard early.
In time, I led him back to the Rainmaker. He frowned, told me, “I’m generous to a fault, Garrett. Anyone will tell you that. Especially where my little girl is concerned. But I won’t let you milk this forever.”
“That’s good to hear. ’Cause I’m sick of the whole damned thing. I’ve got one bruise too many, for nothing.”
Morley returned to hover in time to overhear. He lifted an eyebrow.
I continued, “I’m closing this down soon as we eat.”
Morley stifled his surprise, but Chaz and her pop both blurted, “What?”
“We eat, I take you to Cleaver, my part’s done. You all settle up. I’m home having a beer before I hit the sack.”
Direheart started to get up. He was ready.
Morley started slide-stepping toward the kitchen. Maybe he was headed for cover.
Chaz smiled like her brain had gone north. I’d begun to wonder about her. When her dad was around, she worked at cute and dumb.
“Sit down,” I said. “Morley went to a lot of trouble with your order. And Cleaver will be there when we get there.” Dinner hadn’t yet arrived.
Morley could’ve been going to check its progress, but I wouldn’t have bet two dead flies on that.
Nice of him to be so predictable.
After the Tops, I didn’t have a trick left. What I hadn’t used I’d lost or had taken. Might have been smart to see Handsome before dinner.
Too late now.
Dinner did come. I drooled over Direheart’s while I choked down mine, a kind of souffle thingee I’d had before and hadn’t found myself vomiting . . . But this time somebody clever had chopped green peppers into the mix.
Morley looked so innocent I would’ve strangled him if I hadn’t needed him.
I told Direheart, “There’s no way you’re going to get your book back. It’s long gone.”
The man was resilient. He displayed one scant instant of surprise. “Oh?”
“Near as I can tell, Maggie Jenn’s daughter swiped it from Cleaver about a year ago, brought it to TunFaire, showed it to the wrong people, had it snatched by the human rights nuts.” Which was true, to that point.
The Firelord smiled, in control. “I rather doubted I’d see it again, especially considering the bloodletting following it.”
“Just wanted you to understand.”
“Could you recover it if I hired you to?”
“I don’t want the job. There’re too many people ready to kill people over it.”
Direheart didn’t like what he heard. It wasn’t Good Old Fred who laid that evil eye on me while he wondered what I was doing.
I saw him decide that I was too damned lazy to glom the book for myself.
The Firelord ate like a little dog trying to get his fill before the big dogs come. I ate at a leisurely pace, mostly staring at Chaz, who matched me bite for bite and stared right back, all but hollering her wicked intentions.
My stride faltered a few steps into the street. There should have been more people out. Some hint must have escaped the Joy House.
If the Firelord noticed he didn’t let on. Maybe he didn’t. He’d been in the Cantard forever. He’d be street naive.
Chaz was uncomfortable, though. She knew an off odor when she smelled one. The dumb blonde disappeared fast.
Considering my recent experiences, I didn’t think it unreasonable to be alert to the point of frayed nerves. So, naturally, nothing happened. Except . . .
Wings beat the cool evening air. I braced for the advent of some batwinged demon belched from the hell of one of TunFaire’s thousand and one cults.
The mythological is manageable.
Reality can be uglier.
The Goddamn Parrot plopped onto my shoulder.
I batted at it. “That goddamn Dean! Comes home in the middle of the night, lets that monster get loose.” How did the damned thing find me?
The bird remained silent as it fluttered to Chaz’s shoulder. It was unnatural.
“What the matter with you, bird? Chaz, he’ll probably mess on you.” This adventure wasn’t going the way I’d hoped.
I didn’t try to confuse anybody. I took the direct route. We weren’t halfway there when Chaz chirped, “The Bledsoe?”
For Morley’s sake—he had to be out in the darkness somewhere—I replied, “Where else? He’s used up his other hideouts. And they don’t know the real him there.”
Maybe. I’d begun to doubt my intuition already.
And I’d begun to doubt my good sense. Head into danger with a sorcerer? I had no cause to trust Direheart. His sort were notoriously treacherous. And my only insurance was a dark-elf with a broken wing who might not remain devoted to my well-being once he sighted the Rainmaker.
People say I think too much. No doubt . . . Why on earth did I think Cleaver would hang around TunFaire after his latest misadventure? Why, of all places, would he hide out at the Bledsoe?
I was one rattled guy when I pushed into the Bledsoe receiving lobby. But I got my confidence back fast.
Two steps in I spotted the female half of the elderly couple I’d held captive at that ugly warehouse. She spotted me, too, and headed out at her fastest shuffle. She made her break for the stairwell I’d used to make my getaway a couple of ages ago.
I won the race. “Hello again.”
Direheart joined me. “Somebody you know?”
I offered a brief synopsis.
The Firelord surveyed the area. Our arrival hadn’t gone unremarked. Staff were gathering. I saw familiar, unfriendly faces. “These guys can’t take a joke, Fred.” He’d heard a bare bones version of my incarceration. Those guys made the mistake of thinking it was payback time.
The Firelord did one of those things that make regular folks uncomfortable when his sort are around. It involved muttering and finger-wiggling and a sudden darkness as black as a lawyer’s heart. An instant after that there were pillars of fire everywhere. Each contained a staffer who objected loudly. One unfortunate goose-stepped toward us. Direheart fixed it so we needn’t hear his shrieks, but the guy kept on trying. He became a human torch to light our climb.
Chaz wasn’t shocked. Her daddy hadn’t disillusioned her.
The old woman broke away and tried to outclimb us. She failed. We passed the ward where I’d done my damage. The fixing up had hardly begun. I wasted a tear for Ivy and Slither.
The old woman suddenly wheeled like she had some mad idea about holding us off. She was a horrible vision, illuminated by the burning man. Her terror was absolute, but so was her determination. Death was in her eyes. She was a sow bear between hunter and cub . . .
Bingo. I knew her now, nose to nose and her eyes on fire. Take away a few decades of pain and poverty and you’d have another Maggie Jenn.
Maggie hadn’t said anything about her mother’s fate.
The topmost floor of the Bledsoe was reserved for those who had no truck with poverty except by way of charity. It sustained an environment those folks would deem minimally adequate while they decided the fates of TunFaire’s Waldo Tharpes.
We didn’t need the burning man up there. Good Old Fred let him go. He collapsed, burnt meat and charred bone. Direheart ignored the old woman. We didn’t need her. I tried to shoo her away. She wouldn’t go.
Chaz wasn’t frayed but didn’t seem to be in close touch with reality anymore, either. During my own occasional brushes with sanity I’d begun wondering if she really was the girl for me. Her good points were obvious, but something was missing. When Good Old Fred was around she could turn into a zombie.
That green-and-yellow-and-red feather duster on her shoulder didn’t betray any character, either.
Weird.
It got weirder.
First, Ichabod rernaterialized. Pardon me. Make that Zeke. Maybe he came back from the grave. I’d thought he’d got plenty dead on the Hill. But here he was, all skin, bones, and white hair, trying to heft a big black sword that was beyond his strength. Good Old Fred did some evil things. That sword turned on Zeke. The old boy didn’t even get out a good scream.
Mugwump emerged from the shadows. That human stump was not in a good mood. (He had to be immune to disaster.) I was glad Fred was in between us.
Direheart wasn’t ready for a Mugwump. Mugwump like to broke him into kindling before he conjured a bucket of eldritch fire. Mugwump ended up blind and burning. Direheart came away dragging a foot. He couldn’t use his left arm.
Chaz showed no distress. She drifted along, gorgeous and empty and handy. Her dullness worried me more and more.
The Goddamn Parrot’s silence didn’t help.
Then we found a sleep-fuddled Grange Cleaver trying to pull himself together. Twenty feet separated us from him. Fred went out of control. He snarled, cursed, pulled a knife, and charged. Cleaver got loose from his cot and discarded his surprise. He pulled two knives. Lucky he wasn’t one of those gods with a bunch of arms. He threw both blades. One knicked Direheart’s right shoulder.
The blow wasn’t crippling, but it did put the firelord’s good arm out of commission. Sorcerers don’t do well when they can’t talk with their hands.
I closed in on Cleaver. Cleaver had another blade. He assumed a knifefighter’s crouch, edged sideways. His eyes were hard, narrow, and serious. He didn’t seem frightened.
Chaz said something. I told her, “Take care of your father. After you lock the door.” The Bledsoe was crawling with guys who begrudged me my fine escape.
Direheart shook Chaz off. Calmly, he explained to the Rainmaker how he was going to feed his scum-sucking corpse to the rats. Direheart had him an awful big anger about that old burglary.
Cleaver kept his knife weaving between him and me. He edged toward an outside wall. His caution seemed to be taking him back into a corner.
I got it way too late.
Direheart tried to let me become Cleaver’s focus while he got ready to sneak in some deadly spell . . .
Cleaver lunged at me. I stumbled back. Quick as a conjurer, the Rainmaker spun and flipped his blade. It sank into Direheart’s throat.
I froze. Chaz screamed. Cleaver cackled, whirled, jumped out a window. Chaz grabbed me with one hand and her father with the other, pulled like I could do something.
A born gentleman, I grabbed blond hair and pried her loose. “You’re a physician. Do what you trained for.”
I threw one angry glance at the old woman, let her get on with her shuffling getaway. Oh, she was ready to go now. I went after Cleaver.
I’m not fond of heights—especially if Mrs. Garrett’s boy might conceivably fall therefrom. I paused to eyeball the scaffolding below me.
Sneering laughter electrified me. I dropped the eight feet to the highest level the workmen had reached. I made a lucky grab and didn’t plunge sixty feet to the cobblestones, where shadows darted. I was too far up to recognize anybody—not to mention I didn’t consider trying.
The Goddamn Parrot swooped past, dove through the scaffolding. He zig-zagged like a bat, let out one serious squawk as he ripped past Cleaver. The Rainmaker cursed. Softly.
I concentrated on not achieving the unexpected experience of flight. All my hands grabbed anything convenient. All my feet assiduously maintained contact with whatever lay beneath them. I stormed slowly toward the Goddamn Parrot’s noxious racket.
Cleaver cursed again. He’d looked down into a dark future. Big trouble was waiting.
I checked the street, too. Its shadows harbored folks who wanted to talk to the Rainmaker up close and personal. They must have picked up a clue or two via denizens of the Joy House.
Instead of heading down, Cleaver fled around the Bledsoe. Through one open window I spied Outfit hardcases on the prowl. Belinda must have had a crew on standby.
I don’t quite get Morley’s relationship with those people. He’s no made man himself. He does them more favors than seems right.
The Goddamn Parrot kept beaking news of Cleaver’s progress. I really wondered about that bird. This was out of character. His natural style would be to betray me, instead.
The thugs below couldn’t see us. They tried to track the bird, too.
That hunk of spoiled hawk bait blew the big one. Cleaver set an ambush. He let me slink right into it.
I was twice Cleaver’s weight and twice Cleaver’s strength and that saved me a three-story decline in fortunes. He threw himself at me. I grabbed some scaffold and absorbed the impact. I tried to glom onto him while I was at it but didn’t do real well.
He ricocheted off me, banged into an upright, bounced back toward the stone face of the Bledsoe, let loose one whimper of outrage, dropped into the gap between scaffolding and building. He scratched and grabbed and banged around as he fell but didn’t verbalize at all.
I followed more cautiously. The Goddamn Parrot flapped around me but managed to keep his big damned beak shut. I caught up.
Cleaver had broken his fall and dragged himself onto planking maybe ten feet off the ground. His breathing was shallow and rapid. He wasn’t in good shape. But he bit down on his pain.
The vinegar was out of him, but I moved carefully anyway. A guy has the Rainmaker’s rep, you’re careful with him even after he’s dead.
I dropped to one knee. A hand seized mine. I jerked away for an instant, startled. That hand was warm and soft.
“We could have had . . . something. But you’re . . . too damned dumb . . . Garrett. And stubborn.”
I don’t know about stubborn, but I was doing dumb pretty good. I didn’t get it right away.
Cleaver was fading. Didn’t seem right, considering his record. A long, agonizing cancer was more in order, not this just kind of drifting off into oblivion.
My hands were trapped. I didn’t try hard to pull away. I had empathy enough to guess what was happening in Cleaver’s mind. Though broken, he pulled himself toward me, closer, closer . . .
Realization came slowly, sort of sideways, without generating much shock. This creature desperately grasping at one final moment of human contact wasn’t male at all.
I held her. I murmured, “Yes, love,” when she returned to her notion that we might have had something remarkable.
I’d been wrong from the beginning. But so had all TunFaire. Past and present, high and low, we’d all seen only what society had conditioned us to see. And in her madness, she had exploited that blindness.
There never was any nasty little villain named Grange Cleaver. Not ever. Never.
I shed a tear myself.
You had to if you encompassed any humanity, recognizing the enduring hell necessary to create a Grange Cleaver.
You could weep for the pain of the child while knowing you had to destroy the monster it had become.
I lost Chaz at the Bledsoe. I don’t know why. Maybe, emotionally, she chose to blame me for what had happened to her father.
Her medical skills hadn’t been adequate.
Whatever the reason, the magic failed that night.
It was not one of my better nights. I blew the rest of it retailing explanations. Seemed anyone who’d ever heard of me or Grange Cleaver wanted all the dope. I was actually pleased when Relway materialized.
He was a magic man was Relway. People vanished in droves.
“It’s all straightened out now, Garrett,” Colonel Block told me. I was visiting him again. After having been allowed another ten hours of cell time to ripen. I’d had to do my time with the Goddamn Parrot, too. “Weren’t nearly so many bodies this time.” He looked at me expectantly.
I tried not to disappoint him but kept it short and got out. He wasn’t much interested. Didn’t even ask much about the Tops. He was preoccupied with the racial strife.
I headed for home. I didn’t manage to leave the bird of doom behind. For no obvious reason, that breathing feather duster didn’t have much to say. Even while we’d been locked up he’d held it down most of the time.
Maybe he was sick. Maybe he had some terminal bird disease. I couldn’t be that lucky.
Dean didn’t respond when I pounded on my front door. Irked, I used my key, went in and stomped around hollering and cussing till I was convinced the old boy wasn’t there after all. There was no sign he’d come back.
Huh? How’d the bird get loose?
Add another puzzle. Why hadn’t Emerald taken advantage of my extended absence? The kitchen suggested that she had visited several times and was less than fanatical about order and cleanliness. But she hadn’t tried to bust out.
Strange.
Stranger still, T.G. Parrot went to his perch without a squawk.
That was more than strange. It was suspicious.
“Justina? I need to tell you something.” It wasn’t going to be easy.
She was seated on Dean’s bed. She looked at me without emotion but with what seemed too-knowing eyes.
Straight ahead seemed the best way. I told her.
She continued to look at me, apparently unsurprised.
But she did love her mother—despite knowing the truth about Maggie Jenn and Grange Cleaver. She broke.
I held her while the tears flowed. She accepted that but nothing more and never said a word, even while I led her to the front door and told her she was free to go.
“Chip off the old blockhead,” I muttered, a little put out, as I watched her fade into the crowds. “Oh, but she was beautiful, though.”
I was in no way pleased with the case. I don’t like unhappy endings even though they’re the most common kind. And I wasn’t certain that much had been settled or wrapped up.
I locked myself in. I didn’t answer the door. I just used the peephole whenever some sociopath compulsively exercised his knuckles. I argued with the Goddamn Parrot. That squawking squab was slower than normal but nailed me with the occasional zinger.
Suspiciouser and suspiciouser.
Ever bold in the face of despair, I sent a letter up the Hill. Never got so much as a “Drop dead!” back.
And I’d just about decided Chaz was the lady for me. Oh, well. Live and learn.
I asked Eleanor, “Don’t know what she’s missing, does she?” That killed the ache, boy.
I swear Eleanor sneered. I could about hear her whisper, “Maybe she does.”
I got the distinct feeling Eleanor thought it was time I stopped being stubborn about not apologizing to Tinnie Tate for whatever it was I didn’t know I did, or maybe never did.
“Or I could look Maya up. She looked good the other night. And she’s got her head on straight.” Eleanor’s smile threatened to become a grin.
I broke training once, allowed one special visitor inside. You couldn’t refuse the kingpin of crime. Belinda Contague spent an enigmatic half hour at my kitchen table. I didn’t disabuse her of her notion that, with the invaluable assistance of my acquaintance Morley Dotes, I’d engineered the fall of Grange Cleaver just for her. I guess for old time’s sake.
She’s one spooky black widow of a gal, bones of ice. Probably a real good idea she decided we should stay “just friends.” Anything else could turn fatal.
Belinda expressed herself the one way she knew well, learned at daddy Chodo’s knee. She gave me a little sack of gold. I passed it quickly into the Dead Man’s care.
The Rainmaker business had been profitable, anyway.
Days slipped away. I sneaked out on several little errands, each time discovering that I still had one watcher on me. Becky Frierka was determined to collect her dinner. I saw no evidence her mother discouraged her from dating older men.
Mostly I kept it up with the bird and Eleanor, then went to reading with a frown that threatened permanent headache. I began to think Dean wasn’t coming home and Winger might actually have the sense to stay away from me. Or maybe her luck had run out.
“It’s gotten awful damned quiet,” I told Eleanor. “Kind of like in those stories where some dope says, ‘It’s too quiet . . . ’ ”
Someone knocked.
Starved for real conversation, I scurried toward the door. Hell, a night out with Becky didn’t sound that bad anymore.
I peeked. “Well!” Things were looking up. I yanked the door open. “Linda Lee Luther. You lovely thing. I was just thinking about you.”
She smiled uncertainly.
I grinned. “I’ve got something for you.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
“You’re way too young and beautiful to be so cynical.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Can’t possibly be mine. Come on in here. Got a story to tell you.”
Linda Lee came in but made sure that I saw she still had her cynical face on. And that after she’d come all the way down to see me.
The Goddamn Parrot let out a whoop. “Hey, mama! Shake it up!”
“Stifle it, catfood.” I closed the door to the small front room. “You interested in a new pet?” So happened I knew she had a cat.
“If I wanted one that talks, I’d pick up a sailor.”
“Marines are way more interesting.” I set us up in the kitchen, which was clean. Life had been that slow. I poured Linda Lee a brandy. She nursed that while I talked about the Rainmaker business.
One of Linda Lee’s less blatant charms is her ability to listen. She doesn’t interrupt and she does pay attention. She didn’t comment until I paused to freshen my beer and pour her a dribble more brandy. Then she cut right to it. “What did you find when you went back?”
“Wreckage. The Guard tore the Tops up. Sending a message to the Call. Most of the Venageti were still there. They didn’t know where to run. Guys like them could turn out to be another big headache. Come on to my office.”
She gave me a kind of puzzled look, like my office was the last place she expected to be lured. She stretched like a cat as she left her chair. Woo!
I got my breathing under control. “Plop it into that chair.” I squeezed around and into mine, dropped a hand down under my desk, dragged out one of those masterpieces that had been giving me wrinkles. “Look at this.”
“Oh, Garrett!” She squealed. She bounced up and down. She squealed some more, jiggling deliriously all the while. “You found it!” She dashed around the desk and hopped into my lap. “You great big wonderful hero.”
Who am I to complain? I had an idiot bird in the next room covering that. He went to carrying on like he was being murdered. I smirked and surrendered to Linda Lee’s excitement.
When she paused to catch her breath, I leaned down and coaxed another book out of hiding. “Apparently nobody who knew those were there survived the excitement at the Tops. None of the interested parties thought to check, either.” At least they hadn’t before the notion came to me.
“This is a true first, too! I’ve never seen a Raging Blades before. Where did they find it?”
“It’s the book Emerald stole from her mother. Her mother stole it from Firelord Direheart. No telling who he stole it from. The boys at Wixon and White got it away from Emerald somehow, but she complained to her pals in the Call. That wasn’t real bright, but how many kids her age, spoiled the way she was, have a full ration of sense?”
Linda Lee snuggled down and opened the book.
“Wish you’d treat me that tenderly,” I observed.
“Oh, no. I’m not going to be tender at all.” She purred and turned a page.
I stretched down and retrieved the third book of the trilogy.
“The Battle-Storm! Garrett! Nobody’s had a complete set for three hundred years.” She let Raging Blades fall into her lap and grabbed Battle-Storm. I leaned back, relaxed, felt smug.
I got so relaxed I almost dozed off while Linda Lee sighed over her treasures.
A squeal of fury ripped me out of a reverie wherein I stood idly by while my old pal Winger enjoyed her just deserts. “What?” Silly me, for a second I thought she’d stumbled onto the secret of Eagle’s treasure.
“This is a forgery! Garrett, look at this page. It shows a watermark that didn’t appear till two centuries after Eagle’s sagas were recorded.” She seemed totally deflated.
“You were floating a yard off the floor when you only thought you had your Steel-Game back. Now you’ve got two originals and a copy . . . ”
“Grrr! Yeah, you’re right. But it really makes me mad. It isn’t really all a copy or forgery. Part is original. You see what they did? They took out some pages and replaced them with forgeries.”
I showed more interest then. I leaned over. She was examining the book I’d seen at Wixon and White, not, as I’d expected, The Battle-Storm. “Emerald’s book. Any idea how long ago it was altered?”
“The paper is old. It’s just not as old as it ought to be. And if you look really close at the ink, you can see it isn’t nearly as faded as it should be.”
“Never mind the paper, love. I wanted old paper I’d steal an old book somewhere and scrape some pages down.” Which is what master forgers do when a document has to look old.
“Oh. You’re right.” She studied the book some more. “I’d guess it was done quite recently. Somebody dismantled it, then put it back together with the new pages but couldn’t match the original thread. This looks like a standard bindery thread like what we use at the library.” She got after the other two books. “Damn! This Battle-storm isn’t even a first. It’s early, though. Maybe a student’s copy of the Weisdal Illumination. And look! Somebody’s tampered with Steel-Game, too. This whole signature is a replacement. They’re going to hang me out, Garrett. This book was all right before it was stolen.”
Interesting. It occurred to me to wonder if Emerald Jenn wasn’t just as clever and conniving as the woman who’d borne her. “You do have a copy, though. Don’t you? Squirreled away, just in case?”
Linda Lee scowled. “Maybe.”
“Of course you do. It might be interesting to compare texts.”
Up front the Goddamn Parrot started having a fit. Sounded like he was laughing.
Linda Lee hugged a book to her chest with one hand, gulped the rest of her brandy. “I need you to walk me back to the library.”
“Right now?” Boy, don’t whimper.
“There’s nobody there.” She took a big key out of a pocket in her skirt. “They’re gone for the weekend.”
My white knight side took over. “Of course I’ll go with you. People kill people because of these books.”
I locked my door, pranced down to the street. I waved to Mrs. Cardonlos. She hoisted her nose so fast she threw her neck out of joint. Then I stuck my tongue out at my own house.
I was sure the gesture wasn’t wasted.
Two days passed. I was distinctly distracted when I headed home. I entertained only one non-nostalgic thought during the walk home. Was I the only sucker who hadn’t known about the tampering with the books? Was that why nobody raced to the Tops after the Guard cleared out?
My door opened as I dug for my key. An old guy about as impressive as Ivy glared out at me. “About time you made an appearance. You turned this place into a shambles. The cupboards are bare. You didn’t leave me a groat to shop with.”
Beyond him, the Goddamn Parrot went to work on me, too.
“I had a feeling my luck wouldn’t last.”
“What?”
“You didn’t stay lost.” He’d aged, it seemed. Must have been rough work, keeping reality from setting in on the young couple. “You know where the money is.”
He didn’t like getting close to the Dead Man so he’d moped around hoping to con me. He didn’t say so, though. “And you let someone use my bed.”
“Couple of someones. And a good thing you took your time getting back. Your heart couldn’t have taken being around the last one. You going to let me get into my own house? It’s too early to be out here.” My master plan included half a dozen hours in my own bed. I’d had to vacate the library at that wormcatcher time of day when only abnormals like Dean are awake.
“Mr. Tharpe is here.”
“Saucerhead? Now?” Tharpe’s attitude is more flexible than mine, but he isn’t fond of getting out while there’s still dew in the shade.
“He arrived moments ago. Inasmuch as you were expected shortly, I settled him in the kitchen with a cup of tea.” Not to mention with most of the meager supplies I’d laid in recently, I discovered.
Saucerhead seldom lets a polite refusal get between him and a free meal.
I settled myself. Dean poured tea. I asked Tharpe, “What gives?”
“Message from Winger.”
“Really?”
“She needs some help.” He had trouble keeping a straight face.
“I can’t argue with that. What’s her problem? And why should I give a rat’s whisker?”
Tharpe snickered. “Her problem is she needs somebody to bail her out of the Al-Khar. Seems she got caught digging around inside a certain country home and couldn’t con the Guard into believing that she lived there. In fact, they were on the lookout for a big blonde who might be able to tell them something about what had happened there.”
“I love it. But how did you find out? You sound like Colonel Block.”
“Block came around to Morley’s place on account of he couldn’t find you here.”
“Why’d he want me?” I could guess. Some little question about events at the Tops.
“He said on account of Winger claimed you as her next of kin when they asked who to notify she was inside so she could make bail or get bribe money for the turnkeys or whatever.”
“I see.” Boy did I believe that.
“And I went up and seen her. She already got into it with some screw thought he ought to collect special favors. Broke his arm.”
“They charged her with anything?”
Tharpe shook his head. “Relway’s just trying to squeeze her about what went down. But you know Winger. She’s gonna be stubborn.”
“I know Winger. She’s lucky Relway’s in a good mood these days. Things are going his way.” Bad weather and ferocious behavior by the Guard and secret police had calmed the riots. For now.
There would be more. There had been no good news from the Cantard, like a resumption of the fighting.
“Yeah, I told her. Probably won’t even beat her much.”
“Then let her rot. No. Wait. Here. Run a message for me. Ask Block if he’ll warn me before he turns her loose.”
Saucerhead took my money. “How come?”
“So I can meet her coming out and tell her what a hard time I had getting her cut loose.”
“You’re wicked, Garrett.”
“It’s the company I keep. Been learning from a master.” I jerked a thumb toward the Dead Man’s room.
I shut the door behind Tharpe, locked up, strode to the Dead Man’s door. I leaned inside. He looked the same: big and ugly. “I did all right for a guy whose help is so bone lazy . . . ”
I kept close watch. You were less at risk than you imagine. He puts thoughts directly into your head.
“After you started siccing the bird on me, maybe. By then I’d been through the hairiest part.”
You understand that the Winger creature knew the Jenn woman and Cleaver were one, right from the start?
“Sure. And she knew you were snoring or she’d never have came in here to set her hook. She still has an angle. She thinks. Only Emerald was ahead of everybody, probably from before she ever left home.”
Indeed. The female of your species, if at all presentable, is capable of manipulating the brightest of you.
“If that’s her scheme. The Belindas and Maggies and Emeralds aren’t that common, though. Luckily.”
Far be it from me to note your eagerness to be suborned by such females.
“Yeah. But not far enough.” In the other room the Goddamn Parrot started preaching what the Dead Man was thinking with one of his other minds. “Got to do something about that thing.”
Somebody knocked. Once more you have the opportunity to keep your word.
Becky Frierka. And her mother, of course.
“Why should I be the unique truth-telling character in this part of town?”
As I went to the door the Dead Man sent, The quest for Eagle’s hoard is vain. The burial cairn lay on a slope overlooking Pjesemberdal fjord. That entire mountainside collapsed into the fjord during an earthquake three centuries before my mishap.
“Really?” If anyone around today would know, he would. “Might have been handy to know that before. When you were watching so close.”
Any adventurer who deciphers the sagas discovers the truth eventually. But so much blood gets spilled that the guilty dare not give warning to the world. He loaded that thought up with a cargo of amusement at human antics. But something unrelated leaked through, too. He was worried about the political climate. He had a stake in a tolerant TunFaire.
Details plucked from my mind didn’t reassure him.
I pasted on my boyish grin and got to work. It took an effort to keep smiling. Becky’s mother doesn’t have a husband. She’s actively screening candidates.
Couldn’t have been a better time for my parrot to go berserk, for my houseman to show his mean streak, for my partner to be himself. Naturally, nobody cooperated.
I am nothing if not valiant in my efforts to do the right thing. Becky got her date, exactly according to terms.
Playmate was with me, trying to look fierce as a favor. So were Saucerhead and Winger, whom we’d collected from jail. Two weeks inside hadn’t taught her a thing, which is why I had recruited my friends. I needed help getting Winger to go in the direction I wanted.
A couple weeks can make a big difference in the Safety Zone. Morley’s place had a new name: the Palms. Scraggly palms in pots stood out front, already wilting in TunFaire’s chunky city air. Street lamps had appeared. Elf-breed lads decked out like Venageti colonels stood by to handle horses and coaches, despite the time of day.
Playmate observed, “I don’t think I’ll feel comfortable around here anymore.”
“That’s the point,” Tharpe said. “Dotes has got him some high-tone ambitions all of a sudden. No place here for the likes of us now.”
I glanced at Winger. Still sulking, she didn’t offer an opinion.
The interior of the Joy House had been redecorated to fake the inside of a lunatic’s idea of some tropical shack. I’ve been to the islands. It didn’t work. After Morley bustled us upstairs, so we wouldn’t frighten the customers if any turned up, I told him, “There aren’t enough bugs, old buddy.”
“What? Bugs?”
“Tropical places got bugs. Bugs big enough you got to fight them for table scraps. Flies and mosquitos that’ll hang you up in a tree for later. And lots of them.”
“You can overdo atmosphere, Garrett.”
“Bugs don’t sell to the Hill,” Saucerhead guessed.
Dotes scowled. Our presence made him uncomfortable. I hate it when people social climb. He asked, “What do you want?”
“Just a couple wraps on the Rainmaker thing. Winger’s out, which you probably noticed. And all the trilogy books are accounted for, only somebody mutilated them. Which won’t do them any good.” And I briefed him on what the Dead Man had told me. Given their natures and acquaintances, these four would get the word spread. And people would stop following me around.
I’d begun to accumulate watchers again. I guessed the Venageti at the Tops had mentioned my visit to someone who cared.
Pained, Morley asked, “Seen the girl?”
“Vanished without a trace. Gone treasure hunting, I presume.” I hadn’t tried to find her.
“That’s it?” He was puzzled. He didn’t see my angle.
I didn’t clue him in. “That’s it.”
“Then I have to rush you. I have a million things that need doing before our reopening tonight. One thing before you go, though. A favor I need desperately.”
“You’re starting to talk like those ferocious pirates. What?”
He faked hurt. “Friends are always welcome at the Palms. But we have to present a refined image. If you could dress a little more . . . ”
I got no chance to respond because Winger unloaded first. “You guys ever stick a foot in a fatter load of camel shit? Can you believe this seeping sack of slime? You half-breed runt, I know who you are.”
The lady is articulate in her own special way.
Winger and I came to a meeting of the minds, more or less. Playmate and Tharpe took off. I straggled homeward. Winger tagged along. She didn’t seem eager to put distance between us anymore. “Garrett, it true, what you said about Eagle’s treasure?”
“Absolutely. Came straight from the Dead Man.”
She didn’t want to believe me but decided she had no choice. I was too damned dumb straight-arrow. “That thing awake again?”
“And Dean came home. I’m back to being errand boy in my own house.”
She snapped her ringers. “Shucks. Been a long dry spell, too.”
I shook my head. This is where we started. “You never fail to surprise me, Winger.”
“Huh?” She grabbed my arm, pulled me out of the way as a flight of pixies, buzzing like angry hornets, harried several centaur kids they’d caught stealing. Idly, I noted what looked like one of Relway’s spooks trailing the action.
“Last time you told me that, I found out you had a boyfriend you never mentioned to anybody and he can follow me around like he’s got me on a leash.”
She didn’t lie straight up. “Hightower? Wouldn’t exactly call him a boyfriend . . . ”
“No. More like a sucker who thought he was. And got dead for his trouble.”
“Hey! Don’t you go climbing on your high horse with me! I seen you with your pants down.”
“I’m just reminding you that people you care about get hurt, too, Winger. Lies can kill. If you have to lie to your friends and lovers to get where you want to go, maybe you’d better stop and give a good hard think about whether this is the road you have to follow.”
“Stick it in your do-good ear, Garrett. I got to live with me. You don’t.” Which was about as close to an admission of error or offer of apology as anyone was likely to get out of Winger.
“When you came down here fishing me in, you knew Maggie Jenn was the Rainmaker. You figured you could work an angle, you being the only one outside her crowd that knew. I won’t forget you trying to do that to me.”
Winger never apologizes in any of the customary ways. “I found out by accident. Pure dumb luck. And nobody but her kid really knew for sure. Her old lady and Mugwump and a few others maybe had all the facts right there in their faces, but they didn’t want to believe it . . . What the hell am I doing? It’s over. Done. We got to move on. All the crap that’s going on around town now, this racist bullshit, there’s got to be lots of opportunities. But I’ll check it out later. Why don’t you come on over to my place?”
A temptation, if only to find out where she lived. But I shook my head. “Not this time, Winger.” The Dead Man wanted me to bring him up to date on Glory Mooncalled, events in the Cantard, and recent events in general, real soon now. I knew because he had the Goddamn Parrot following me around, telling me all about whatever notions happened to be bubbling through his feeble minds.
My worst nightmare had come true. I couldn’t get away from him even when I was away from him.
Also, I needed to consult Eleanor on potential career changes. I had some ideas. At their root were the willies I got every time I thought about being caught inside the Bledsoe cuckoo ward.
If I had planned this thing out right, I would have been born rich and would have lived out a useless life as a wastrel playboy.
Doing that life somewhere besides TunFaire probably would have been a good idea, too.
Still, life won’t be completely awful as long as I’m somewhere where they keep brewing beer.