by Glen Cook
Tinnie was not patient. She had rubbed off.
Crush’s taste in reading was unusual. The first thing she brought me was a collection of plays written by Jon Salvation, including the still running Rausta, Queen of the Demenenes, in which Tinnie had had a featured role when the play first went on in Max Weider’s World Theater.
“You’re a fan?”
“He tells wonderful stories.”
The wildest were the ones he made up about himself. “I know him.”
“He’s a friend of yours?”
“No. He comes with a woman named Winger who is my friend.” Sort of. When temptation doesn’t get in the way.
“Wow. I’d like to meet him.”
Suddenly, the girl had a new attitude. I stifled a cynical smile. “Maybe someday. Once this is done.” I noted that Crush wasn’t interested in Morley when her mother wasn’t there. I asked, “Did you know Morley before they brought him here?”
“Not me. DeeDee did. I think.”
She called her mother DeeDee.
“Is there anything to read besides plays?” I wondered who was putting those out there, and how. I’d had a scheme, once, but it had involved using hundreds of ratpeople to make copies.
Kip Prose could, probably, tell me how it was done. If he wasn’t responsible.
“There are some history scrolls. Tedious stuff about the olden times. Somebody left them when he couldn’t pay his tab. Mike never got around to selling them.” The kid leaned closer, whispered, “She gets airs sometimes, she does. Gets above herself.”
All interesting. Grist for the mill. Me soaking stuff up, getting the old ear back.
When I worked up a good case of cabin fever, I tamed it by rolling the sheet back off my friend.
Morley had suffered eight deep stab wounds. He had an additional dozen cuts. And he had a fine collection of bruises and abrasions from having been kicked, clubbed, and dragged.
I hoped that Belinda would have her ear to the ground listening for the brag of the sort of idiot who can’t help telling somebody what he did.
People tell me I think too much. Most of the time things are exactly what they seem. Trying to make more out of them is a mug’s game.
I say that when you stop believing in weird conspiracies that involve scores of people who never break faith, you’re fully ripe for the weird to come get you.
I was thinking that kind of stuff and, alternately, trying to dismiss it or get it to make some kind of sense if I entered Morley into the equation. I couldn’t get anything rational to fall together.
There was nothing to do but wait on the man himself.
13
Somebody shoved against the door to the room so hard that the impact against my cot wakened me.
I got my feet under me. I stood the cot up against the wall. I was not in a good temper when I opened that door.
Miss T was my antagonist. I blurted, “What the hell? This isn’t any time when a rational being...”
I sniffed. Something smelled odd.
“Stuff it, Garrett.”
Miss T had not come alone. That was Belinda Contague.
The smell came from behind me. I glanced at the window. It was dark outside, except for a three-quarters moon. “What the hell?”
One curtain bottom had been pushed a foot aside. Enough for me to see the moon in a cloudless sky. The window was up about three inches. I had left the curtains closed and the window shut.
The smell came from outside.
I forgot about the rude folks in the hall. Something more sinister had been going on. I might ought to be grateful that they had wakened me.
I went to the window. It would not open enough for me to lean out. Every shadow across the street, though, felt like it was hiding something rotten.
I said, “I’m way off my game. I might not be the man for this job, Belinda. Let me ask, less irritably, what’s the occasion?”
Belinda took in the situation with the window. “I brought a healer.” She and Miss T moved aside.
A small, well-rounded, bald-headed man passed between them. He sniffed the air. “I hope that’s not your patient.”
The healer wore dull black clothing in a style declared defunct a hundred fifty years ago. Deservedly. Clotheshorse Morley should have shrunk away even in a coma.
The healer belonged to a cult called the Children of the Light. Of the Dying Light. A prime tenet was no sexual conduct. They were militant pacifists, too — the kind willing to pound the snot out of you if you tried to claim that war might actually solve something. They were born-again do-gooders, as well, but so smugly self-righteous that most people loathed them. They ran soup kitchens. They ran shelters. They ran free clinics. They had made a bid for control of TunFaire’s grand, totally corrupt charity hospital, the Bledsoe. They did a lot of good for a lot of people. Their healers were minor magic users. The Hill turned a blind eye to their unlicensed operations because they confined themselves to charity work.
Cynicism being my nature, when I thought about the Children, I mostly wondered where they got their funding.
Saving the life of a friend of the Queen of Darkness might shake loose a serious donation. Unless she decided to have the healer drowned so he wouldn’t talk about Morley’s condition or whereabouts.
“Excuse me,” nameless round character said. Nobody made introductions. He pushed through and plopped his carpetbag down near the head of the bed. He began examining what was left of my friend.
I urged Belinda over to the window. I used my left thumb and forefinger to measure the gap before I shut it again. “As soon as he can survive it, I want to move him to my place.”
“Factory Slide or Macunado Street?”
“Macunado. Nobody will come after him there.”
“I’d rather move him out to my place in the country.”
I didn’t argue. There’s no point with Belinda. She would go on doing things her way while empires collapsed around her. This time, though, she could be right. The Contague residence didn’t have a live-in Loghyr but it was a fortress. The facilities and amenities were superior.
“It could be a long time before he’s in shape to travel that far.”
I have visited the Contague digs under a range of circumstances. A man could live comfortably there. He could also go in and never be seen again.
Belinda told me, “He won’t go anywhere before he’s ready.” One pallid finger, tipped by a long carmine nail, tapped the windowsill.
I nodded.
A patch of something lay there, glistening. Something drying out. It reminded me of the trail left by a migrating slug.
I whispered, “Send me a pound of salt.”
She might have been Belinda Contague but she was a girl. She didn’t know about salt and slugs. Puzzled, she said, “All right.”
The healer announced, “I’ve done what I can. He won’t die. But he will be a long time getting back to normal. He may have been stabbed with cursed blades.”
That smelled religious, which made no sense. Morley had enemies who would happily poke him full of holes if they could get away with it. They weren’t religious wackos, nor were they so abidingly nasty as to go after his soul as well as his life.
Belinda concluded, “Must be a woman.” No man was that vindictive.
“I don’t know what’s been going on in his life. I see him only when we stop in at the Grapevine after a show. You know my situation.”
“I tried to talk to Tinnie. I wanted her to know what’s happening.”
I didn’t like her tone.
“I was polite and respectful, Garrett. She was not.”
I really didn’t like her tone. Tinnie could get hurt. “She’s really insecure...”
“I just tried to explain the situation. She didn’t endear herself. It wasn’t about her.”
Almost certainly my dearly beloved had failed to become more intimate with fierce pain primarily because she was my dearly beloved. Could she be made to understand that a
nymore?
Tinnie couldn’t have changed that much. How could she? She was brilliant. She understood the real world. She had shared its harsh realities with me. She could figure things out. She had discovered, years ago, that Tinnie Tate was not the center, fulcrum, or favorite child of the universe.
I had this chill like it was midnight on the boulevard, and I was fixing to whistle my way past the graveyard.
I had an epiphany. “We’re seeing symptoms, not the disease.”
Belinda grunted, more interested in watching slime dry.
I stopped worrying about my troubles and checked my pal. His color and breathing had improved. He looked ready to wake up.
The round cultist went away. Belinda and I looked at each other. We wore big, goofy grins.
I went right on having trouble believing there could be anything but business between her and Morley.
14
We were alone. The three of us. Morley fought the good fight, trying to escape his nightmares. I wandered my own realms of fear, where my ill-defined love for a friend might have cost me everything else I held dear. Belinda sat beside me on the cot. We leaned back against the door. She was so far gone off somewhere else I wondered if she could get back. Maybe she was trying to find Morley so she could lead him home.
She blurted, “I didn’t get there in time.”
“What? Where? In time for what?”
“Raisin’s Bookshop. In time to round up Two Step Timmy.”
No point correcting her. Her heart was in the right place, though maybe oddly shaped, hard, and cold.
“Made a run for it, did he?”
“Straight to the Al-Khar. The tin whistles beat me there.”
“They get more efficient by the day. Hard on both of us.”
“A few still appreciate a generous tip.”
“Good to know. You get anything interesting?”
“Two Step said his interlocutor was a woman.”
“Damn. Look at you. You been taking a class? Interlocutor?”
“Oh, yes. Look at me. Damned near as smart as your ratgirl.”
“I’m too tired to squabble. I’ve got redheads on the brain.”
“You’d salivate if you met this one. If Timmy told the truth.”
Not many guys lie once they’re inside the Al-Khar, and the truth is the only key to getting out.
“No more redheads.”
“I’m talking red hot, not red hair. Young and with a flair for show. Two Step says she wore skintight black leather.”
“You naughty girl.”
“Not me, dolt. Not anymore. I sag in too many places to make it work.”
Golden-tongue Garrett conceded, “I know that.” And he didn’t even realize he’d stepped in it.
“Oh, yes. That’s why I love you. You say the sweetest things.”
“I wish your whole species would dispense with that stuff. Can’t talk about the damned weather without it turning into...”
“Can it, Garrett. What Two Step said could mean we have a bigger problem.”
“I’m listening.”
“The one witness to the attack on Morley told me that a well-assembled girl in skintight black leather directed the creatures who stabbed him. She had about a cubic yard of bushy blond curls. The girl Two Step met was a short-haired brunette with intense brown eyes. The blonde, no telling about the eyes.”
“Creatures?”
“Men in tight wool costumes with big gray eggs for heads.”
“You didn’t bother to tell me before?”
“I couldn’t tell you what I didn’t know then.”
I got that. “Go see Puddle and Sarge. They might know what he was into.” She didn’t respond. I had just said something dumb. I guessed, “They didn’t know anything.”
“You are correct, sir. Morley walked out of the Grapevine after the late play rush. They never saw him again. And that was all they knew.”
I had no trouble believing it. That was Morley Freaking Dotes, total individualist. “I guess all we can do is be patient and hope he gives us something when he wakes up.”
“You’re a screaming genius, Garrett. I’m so glad Morley and I have you for a friend.”
“I am a special kind of guy.”
15
The sun was up when I awakened. So was the queen of crime, in a good mood despite being caught in the inelegant process of riding a chamber pot. She pointed. “Look there.”
“What am I supposed to notice?”
“We closed the curtains and the window.”
Oh.
The curtains had been pushed aside. The window had been raised four inches. And the sill glistened with more dried slime.
“I never liked the kind of window that slides up and down.”
“I don’t know why I woke up when I did. I don’t care. But when I did I saw what looked like a python oozing through the crack. It was about a yard in. I guess it was headed for Morley.”
I eased over, studied the window close up. That allowed her some dignity at the same time. “A big snake? Really?”
“Not exactly. You saw real giant snakes when you were off in the islands. You probably wouldn’t have been impressed. But that’s what it looked like to me.”
“It went away once it realized you were awake.”
“After I hit it about twenty times with your club.”
The woman was gorgeous and brilliant and evil, but she was no connoisseur of personal-use nonlethal defensive instruments. I carried nothing so mundane as a club.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“I hollered. You didn’t even roll over. Then I was busy slamming the slime out of that damned thing.”
“You should’ve poked me with the stick.”
“I was distracted. I didn’t think of that.” And that was right in character. She hardly ever asked for help, even when she had no choice. This thing with Morley was a wonderment.
“All right. Tell me how it happened. In order. Exactly.”
“I told you. There was this snake thing. I pounded on it till it pulled back. The shiny stuff is what it left. And, yes, I know we have to move Morley now because we can’t totally protect him here.”
Morley made a noise. I thought he wanted to say something. I was wrong. He had a problem with phlegm.
“That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
“I think so.” For a few seconds Belinda was the woman she could have been if she had chosen different parents and wasn’t a flaming sociopath.
“You got anybody set up around here besides me?”
“Outside. You’re my inside guy. You’re the one I trust.”
Somebody tapped on the door. I couldn’t help myself. “What’s the password?”
“How about ‘Breakfast,’ nimrod?” That sounded like DeeDee.
Belinda collected my head knocker and got ready to brain an intruder clever enough to mimic DeeDee’s twang.
I cleared the bowl and pitcher off the nightstand. DeeDee parked the tray she carried. She turned on Dotes. “It worked! He looks a thousand percent better. He’s coming back. He’s going to be all right.” She bounced and clapped her hands like a girl younger than Crush, then bolted out.
I asked, “What’s the story there?”
“I don’t know. It may be best that I don’t.”
I hadn’t meant DeeDee’s connection to Morley. I’d meant DeeDee and Hellbore. On reflection, though, there was no reason for Belinda to know anything about employees so far down the food chain that they dealt direct with the folks whose money fueled the Combine engine.
“She brought food enough for us and our childhood invisible friends. Let’s do some damage.” I hadn’t eaten since I left Macunado Street.
DeeDee came back with Crush before we were done. Crush jumped all over me. “You weren’t supposed to eat the cream of wheat!”
“The what?”
“The mush, nimrod! That was for him. The heavy stuff was for you.”
The invisi
ble friends must have gotten that. I hadn’t seen anything I considered part of a hearty breakfast. “The nearest thing to a real breakfast...”
Belinda squeezed my left elbow. She had some grip for a girl. “Garrett, your job is to keep your mouth shut, look pretty, and break the legs of anybody who tries to hurt Morley.”
I could do two out of three blindfolded but the mouth thing has been a lifelong challenge.
“Belinda, silence is too hard.” I was always chock-full of words that want to be free. Some even coagulate into rational... somethings.
16
Good thing Crush and DeeDee were dedicated to Morley’s welfare. I was still wondering if I had what it took to feed him when they finished that and got to work dealing with the consequences of giving an unconscious man food and drink.
He needed bathing. His bed needed changed. I opened the window to the max during the process.
Belinda said, “You have to get more water into him. He’s hot but he isn’t sweating the way he should.”
What would she know about dark elf fevers and sweats? Shrug. I have made a point, lately, of not hearing anything interesting about Miss Contague.
Some would say that I’d made a point of not hearing anything interesting about anybody who lacks red hair.
I wondered how Tinnie was doing.
I said, “My gut is full. While you’re all here I’m going to look around outside.”
Belinda gave me a dire look.
“Fear not. I won’t make a run for it.” I reclaimed my stick and got out, just to stretch my legs.
Belinda’s watchers were easy to find. They all recognized me. They had been with her when she collected me on Factory Slide. They had nothing to report. Two were so bored they would have talked about anything with anybody.
The last one, though, had nothing to say. He had seen something interesting. Something interesting had seen him, too. He looked like he was napping at the top of a stairwell to a cellar. He had been dead long enough to cool down.
A few years ago that would not have moved me. Back then every night produced its crop of corpses for morning harvest. But our great city is fraught, entangled in the throes of change. Casually created cadavers have become uncommon. Director Relway’s winnows have been harsh.