by Glen Cook
Which was a conclusion my partner must have reached before I left the house. Else how to explain Singe’s presence?
Besides being my only friend from TunFaire’s lowest lower class, Pular Singe is the finest tracker amongst a species known for individuals able to follow a trail through the insane stew of foul odors that complement the soul of this mad city.
“Singe? You find a scent yet?” I knew she was sniffing. She couldn’t help herself. And she was clever enough to understand why she had been invited to the party.
She tried to shrug, then to shake her head. Ratfolk find both human gestures difficult. Singe wants to be human so bad. Each time I see it I hurt for her. I get embarrassed. Because most of the time we aren’t worthy of imitation.
Failing, she spoke: “No. Not the elves. Though there is a unique odor where the two fell. But that exists only there. It does not go anywhere. And it does not smell like any odor from a living thing.”
“Wow.” Her human speech had improved dramatically since last I had seen her. It was almost free of accent — except when she tried a contraction. Her improvement was miraculous considering the voice box she had to use. No other rat in my experience had come close to matching her. Yet she was said to suffer from a hearing deficiency. According to the rat thug Reliance, who first brought her to my attention. “You’ve even mastered the sibilants.” Determination can take you a long way. Her sibilants still had a strong serpentine quality. But Singe needs a lot of encouragement to keep going. She gets almost none of that from her own people.
“So what do we do now?” Morley asked. He wasn’t interested, really. Not much. He was trying to work out how he could get back to The Palms and get cleaned up and changed before anyone noticed his disreputable condition. I had a feeling that, any minute now, I would find my best pal missing.
Singe said, “I cannot follow the strange elves. But Garrett taught me to follow the horses when I cannot follow a target who becomes a passenger in a vehicle that horses are pulling.”
What a talent, that Garrett guy. After a moment, I confessed, “The student lost even the teacher on that one, Singe.”
She looked at me like she knew I was just saying that so she’d feel good, getting to explain. “The elves took the boy. Him I can track. So I will follow him. Wherever he stops moving, there will we find your elves.”
“The girl is a genius,” I said. “Let’s all go raid Playmate’s pantry before we go on the road.”
That idea was acclaimed enthusiastically by everyone not named Playmate. Or Morley. Playmate because his charity is limited when its wannabe beneficiaries are solvent. Morley because the weasel wasn’t around to vote.
Ah, well. My elven friend would be out there somewhere, a desperate fugitive fleeing the wrath of the good-grooming gods.
12
Saucerhead’s impatient pacing took him across the narrow street and back three times as he tried to establish a safe passage around a particularly irritable camel. No owner of the beast was in evidence. I was surprised to see it. Camels are rare this far south. Possibly no one would have this one. Possibly it had been abandoned. It was a beast as foul as the Goddamn Parrot. It voided its bowels, then nipped at Saucerhead. I muttered, “That’s what I feel like right now.”
“Which end?” Singe asked, testing her theory of humor. She giggled. So bold, this ratgirl who came out in the daytime, then dared to make jokes in front of human beings.
“Take your pick. You know what that thing really is? A horse without its disguise on.”
Even Singe thought that was absurd. And she has less love for the four-legged terrors than I do. You could say a state of war, of low intensity, exists between her species and theirs. Horses dislike ratpeople more than most humans do.
Playmate said, “One day I fully expect to find you on the steps of the Chancery, between Barking Dog Amato and Woodie Granger, foaming at the mouth as you rant at the King and the whole royal family because they’re pawns of the great equine conspiracy, Garrett.”
The Chancery is a principal government building where, traditionally, anyone with a grievance can voice it publicly on the outside steps. Inevitably, the Chancery steps have acquired a bevy of professional complainers and outright lunatics. Most people consider them cheap entertainment.
I said, “You shouldn’t talk about it! They’re going to get you now.” Singe started looking worried, frowning. “All right. Maybe I exaggerate a little. But they’re still vicious, nasty critters. They’ll turn on you in a second.”
The resident nasty critter spit at Saucerhead. Saucerhead responded with a jab to the camel’s nose. It was a calm, professional blow of the sort that earned him his living. But he put his weight and muscle behind it. The camel rocked back. Its eyes wobbled. Its front knees buckled.
Tharpe said, “Come on.” Once we were past the camel, he added, “Sometimes polite ain’t enough. You just gotta show’em who’s boss.”
We walked another hundred feet. And stopped. The street didn’t go anywhere. It ended at a wall. Which was improbable.
“What the hell?” Saucerhead demanded. “When did we start blocking off streets?”
He had a point. TunFaire has thousands of dead-end alleys and breezeways but something that happened in antiquity made our rulers issue regulations against blocking thoroughfares. Possibly because they’d wanted to be able to make a run for it in either direction. And while what we were following wasn’t much of a street, it was a street officially. Complete with symbols painted on walls at intersections to indicate that its name was something like Stonebone. Exactly what was impossible to tell. The paint hadn’t been renewed in my lifetime.
The wall ahead was old gray limestone. Exactly like the wall to our left. Needing the attention of a mason just as badly. But something about it made all four of us nervous.
“It sure don’t look like something somebody threw up over the weekend,” I said. Believe it or not, some Karentine subjects are wicked enough to ignore established regulations and will construct something illegal while the city functionaries are off duty.
Nobody stepped up to the wall. Until Singe snorted the way only a woman can do when she’s exasperated with men being men. She shuffled right up till her pointy big nose was half an inch from the limestone. “The track of the boy goes straight on, Garrett. And this wall smells almost the same as the odor I found where the two elves fell on one another.”
Playmate took a few steps backward, found a bit of broken brick that hadn’t yet been scrounged by the street children. (They sell brick chips and chunks back to the brickyards, where they’re powdered and added to the clay of new bricks.) He started to wind up, but paused and said, “Garrett, have you bothered to look up?”
I hadn’t. Why would I?
None of the others had, either.
We all looked now.
That wall wasn’t part of anything. It might not even be stone. It just went up a ways, then turned fuzzy and wiggly and lizard’s belly white. Then it turned misty. Then it turned into nothing.
“It’s an illusion.”
Playmate chucked his brickbat.
The missile proceeded to proceed despite the presence of a wall that appeared completely solid, if improbably cold and damp when I extended a cautious finger to test it. Saucerhead Tharpe isn’t nearly as careful as Mama Garrett’s only surviving son. He reached out to thump that wall. And his fist went right on through.
We all stepped back. We exchanged troubled looks. I said, “That’s an illusion of the highest order.”
Singe said, “I hear someone calling from the other side.”
Playmate observed, “An illusion that persists, that can be used as camouflage, requires the efforts of a master wizard.”
I grunted. In this town that meant somebody off the Hill. It meant one of six dozen or so people who are the real masters in Karenta.
Singe said, “There is somebody over there. Yelling at you, Garrett.”
I asked Playmate, “Wh
at do you think?” I admit to being intimidated by Hill people. But I’ve never backed down just because they stuck a finger in somewhere. I wouldn’t back down now. Kip’s kidnapping had me irked and interested. Of everyone I asked, “Anybody want to walk away?”
Nobody volunteered to leave, though Saucerhead gulped a pail of air, Playmate seemed to go a little green and Singe started shaking like she was naked in a blizzard and didn’t have a clue which way to the warm. She made some kind of chalk sign on a real wall, maybe to ward off evil.
“You’re the Marine,” Playmate said. “Show us your stuff.”
Saucerhead pasted on a huge grin. He was ex-army, too. And he had heard my opinions concerning the relative merits of the services more often than had Playmate. He refused to see the light. It’s a debate that seems doomed to persist forever because army types are too dim to recognize the truth when it kicks them in the teeth.
Saucerhead’s whole face threatened to open up. I thought the top half of his head was going to tip over backward onto his shoulders. He gasped out, “Yeah, Garrett. Let’s see some of that old Marine Corps ‘Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle.’”
Ominously, Singe said, “There is no yelling anymore.”
“I’m thinking about giving you some of that good old, big boy.” I took a deep breath and squared off with the illusory wall.
Saucerhead chuckled. He knows I’d never come straight at him if I did think I had to get after him. Business led us to butt heads briefly once upon a time, long ago. The results had been far from satisfactory from my point of view.
I whooped like I was going in, back in my island warfare days, straight up the middle indeed. Something that we did not actually do very often, as I recall. Us and the Venageti both very much preferred sneaking around, stabbing in the back, to any straightforward and personally risky charging.
That wall was more than just an illusion. It resisted me. Hitting it felt a little like belly flopping, though with more stretch and give to the surface. Which popped after a moment. And which felt as cold as a god’s heart until it did.
My efforts evidently weakened the wall considerably because the big army types followed me through as though there wasn’t any resistance at all. And the civilian followed them. But I wasn’t really keeping track.
We’d overtaken our quarry where they’d holed up temporarily, either so they could interrogate Kip or so their injured buddies could recuperate. There was another imaginary wall beyond them. That one had a bricklike look even though it was semitransparent. From my point of view.
My heart jumped. Our approach had to have been noticed.
In that instant I sensed movement. The corner of the eye kind of movement you get when your imagination is running wild. Only what I wasn’t imagining was happening right in front of me and I couldn’t get a solid look at it. Then, for a moment, I saw silver elves and Kip with something clamped over his mouth and I realized that Singe’s sharp ears must’ve caught his cries for help back when she’d kept talking and nobody had bothered to listen.
A shimmering silver elf extended a hand toward me.
I dodged.
I didn’t move soon enough.
Once again I didn’t feel the darkness arrive.
13
Morley Dotes was right there in my face again when I woke up. “Some kind of party you must throw, Garrett. Blitzed into extinction again. And the sun still hasn’t gone down.” He looked around as I tried to sit up. My head pounded worse than before. “But in an alley? Even if it is a pretty clean one for this burg?”
“Gods! My head! I don’t know what they did to me but it’s enough to make me consider giving up liquor.”
“You give up your beer? Don’t try to kid a kidder, kid.”
“I said liquor, nimrod. Beer is a holy elixir. One shuns beer only at the risk of one’s immortal soul. I see you’re all freshly prettied up. How’d you find us?”
Two of Morley’s henchmen had accompanied him. I didn’t know them. They were clad in the outfits waiters at The Palms usually wear but they were much younger than Sarge and Puddle and Morley’s other traditional associates. Maybe the old guys were getting too old.
“Your girlfriend left us a trail to follow. Standard rat chalk symbols. You didn’t notice? A trained detective like you?”
Pride made me consider fibbing. “No. I didn’t. Not really.” Ten years ago I couldn’t have admitted any failing. Which, at times, had left me looking just a whole lot stupider than a simple confession would’ve done.
People are strange. And sometimes I think I might be the strangest people I know.
Morley’s boys didn’t lift a finger to help anybody. Dotes himself didn’t do anything but talk. Which told me he thought none of us had been hurt badly. “What happened to the illusion?”
“What illusion?”
I explained. Morley wanted to disbelieve but dared not in the face of Saucerhead’s confirmation. Tharpe doesn’t have the imagination to dress himself up with excuses as complex as this.
“So you scared them into running when they’re not really up to it. They have two casualties and a prisoner to manage.”
“We don’t know that any of them were hurt.”
“Yes, we do, Garrett. Use that brain the Dead Man thinks you have. If they don’t have someone injured they don’t have any reason not to just drag the kid straight off to wherever it is they want to take him. Let’s get back on the trail. They can’t have gone far.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe the villains were just around the corner. But I didn’t have any way to track them. Right now.
Singe was still out, stone cold.
“I wonder if they understand how we found them.” I was afraid the elves might’ve given Singe an extra dose of darkness because of her nose.
“Me, I’m wondering why they didn’t hurt you a lot more than they did,” Morley countered. His cure for most ills is to exterminate everybody involved. “For some reason they’ve slapped you down twice without doing any permanent harm.” He has difficulty comprehending that kind of thinking.
He emphasized “permanent” because my expression revealed the depth and breadth of the temporary harm I was suffering.
“You all right, Saucerhead?”
“Got a miserable headache.” Tharpe’s voice was gravelly. His temper would be extremely short. Best not to disturb him at all.
“How’bout you, Play?”
“What he said. And don’t yell. Makes it hurt even more.”
He didn’t need to yell back.
Maybe I was lucky. All the practice I’ve had dealing with hangovers. I turned to Singe. “Seems a shame to disturb her.” She did look rather peaceful.
“Kiss her and let’s get on with it,” Morley grumped. Without having been blessed by the elves.
“What?”
He opened his mouth to crack wise about the sleeping beauty, thought better of it, beckoned me. I followed him for as far as he felt was far enough to keep his remarks from being overhead by sharp rat ears. “She isn’t really out, Garrett. She’s giving you a chance to show some special concern.”
The fact that he didn’t make mock let me know that he was serious, that he was concerned about bruising Singe’s tender ego. Though the motives behind his concern were, probably, wholly selfish.
“Understood,” I told him, though that wasn’t entirely true.
I don’t like the responsibility that piles onto me when Singe gives way to these juvenile urges to manipulate me. That smacks of emotional blackmail. In fact, it is emotional blackmail. She just doesn’t understand that it is. And I’m not all that well equipped to deal with it. More than one lady of my acquaintance would suggest that I’m not far enough away from adolescence myself.
I went to the ratgirl, dropped to my knees beside her. “Singe?”
She didn’t respond. I thought her breathing was too rapid for someone who was supposed to be unconscious, though. How do you tell someone that their relationship
fantasies can never become anything more than that? Everything I could possibly say to Singe would be true but would sound so stupidly cliché if said that I could do no good talking to her. She was important to me, personally and professionally. She had become one of the half dozen closest friends I had. I enjoyed teaching her how to cope in a world where she was less than welcome. But she could never be anything but a friend, a business associate, and a student. And I have no idea how to make her understand that without causing her pain.
When she first broke away from the dominance of her own people, where females have fewer rights than do horses amongst humans, I considered letting her move into my place. I thought of making her part of the team. I still think well of that idea. But the Dead Man did assure me that, in her desperation to be wanted and liked and loved, Pular Singe would give the offer far more weight than I intended.
I touched her throat. Her pulse was rapid. I glanced around. There was no immediate salvation apparent. Morley was grinning, exposing about a thousand bright white needle teeth in a silent taunt.
“You want I should carry her, Garrett?” Saucerhead asked. There went Tharpe, being thoughtful despite his pain. Like most human beings, he can be a mess of contradictions.
“That might be good. Any of you guys know anything about doctoring ratfolk? If we can’t fix her up ourselves we’ll have to take her back to Reliance.”
That ought to be the perfect medicine. The very philosopher’s stone.
Reliance is a sort of ratman godfather, a highly respected and greatly feared leader of that community who’s involved in a lot of questionable and some outright illegal activities. Reliance believes that Pular Singe belongs to him. There’s a chance he’s right within the rules of rat society. There is some sort of indenture involved. But rat society isn’t paramount in TunFaire. And that guy Garrett don’t much care about anybody’s customs or rules when he makes up his mind what’s right and what’s wrong.
“She wouldn’t be real happy about the boss rat getting his paws on her again, Garrett,” Tharpe assured me. With a wink, showing he’d gotten it. “He tried to hire me once to bring her back.” He grinned a grin filled with bad teeth.