by Glen Cook
"I've found that it's best to trust no one completely when I'm working a case. Nobody is ever completely honest with me."
"Truly?"
"Truly. Nobody wants to admit that they're desperate. But they are. Or they wouldn't come to me in the first place. They almost never do until things are out of hand. But that's human nature. You don't want people to know you can't manage your life. You're afraid to look weak."
We walked while Singe and I talked. I was moving more freely now but I still hurt. Doris and Marsha were doing a wonderful job of keeping their mouths shut. Dojango was still napping. He was in the cart.
I had everybody wait in front of the ugly yellow structure while I gave it a careful once-over from outside. The grolls attracted attention wherever they went, of course, but they knew how to discourage gawkers. A growl and a wave of the club each carried, more as decoration than as armament, were enough to discourage most people. For a while.
I wondered if they would use their clubs if pressed. They'd employed them during our visit to the Cantard but they hadn't really wanted to. They were actually gentle people, the Rose triplets. Though the two big ones did get a kick out of panicking people once in a while.
It seemed to me that it might be useful to know what was happening inside Casey's place before I went storming upstairs. "Doris. I need you to hoist me up so I can peek through a window."
Only there wasn't any window.
I stared at the blank brick, tried to visualize the inside of the tenement to see if I'd gotten turned around. I hadn't. So how had I misplaced a window made of glass?
I had Doris put me down. Then I worked my way around the ugly structure. It did have a few unglazed windows, but very few, indicating that it had been erected during the last attempt at establishing a window tax, with the minimum legal number of openings. None of the existing windows were on the fourth floor.
What the hell?
Which was what the place had to be in summer.
"How high can you count?" I asked Doris.
"Garrett, I don't think questions like that are polite."
"You're probably right. But I suspect that I don't much care. Here's what I want. Six minutes after I go in the front door you take your club and knock a hole through the bricks right up there where I was feeling the wall. Don't be shy about it. Haul off and pound a hole right through."
"And then what? When they come to arrest me. Go down fighting? I don't think so."
"Hey... !"
"You're a big-time bullshitter, Garrett, but you ain't big-time enough to bullshit me out of knocking somebody's building down."
"All right. All right." The recent outbreak of law and order was getting to be a real pain. "So don't bust a hole through the wall. Just thump on it hard enough to distract whoever's on the other side. Better give me eight minutes to get up there, though. That's a lot of stairs."
Doris grunted, shuffled over to his brother. They muttered at one another, not pleased because whatever happened here would do so in front of witnesses.
The grolls were beginning to attract gawkers who wouldn't run from a growl and a brandished club. Mostly they were youngsters who should've been asleep, but adults would gather, too, if it became obvious that the grolls would have some entertainment value.
"Singe, you come with me." I headed for the entrance to the tenement. That was filled with spectators who wanted to know what was going on. "We're hunting for Kagyars," I told them, which dumbfounded everyone.
The people of TunFaire and Karenta aren't much interested in their own history.
My remark would've melted their spines half a millennium earlier. The Empire was still in place then but was suffering a swift decline because it was being choked to death by fanatic members of the Orthodox Rite. The Kagyars had been members of a gentle, nonviolent heretical cult whose beliefs must've terrified the hierarchy of the established religion. They invested all their energies and all the treasure of the state in a hundred-year campaign to exterminate the Kagyar heresy.
All that horror and cruelty and evil and today not one Karentine in a thousand can tell you what a Kagyar was. Possibly not even one in ten thousand.
42
"What will you do?" Singe asked.
"Knock on the door and see if anybody answers. Whack them over the head if they do." I brandished my headknocker. There was no peephole in Casey's door so he would have to open up in order to respond.
I knocked. Singe looked around nervously. And sniffed. She said, "It's hard to tell but I think they may have gone back downstairs again."
I knocked some more. "Playmate, Rhafi and I did come up and go down before."
Still no answer to my knock.
The building shuddered. Doris was on the job.
Something fell behind the door.
I did a fast picklock job between club strokes. "Get back against the wall," I told Singe. "Squeeze your eyes tight shut." I pushed the door inward, knelt, tripped the rug booby trap. I got the same crackle, pop, and flash. I avoided problems with my hair this time but did get the fuzz crisped off the outside of my forearm. Casey must've adjusted the aim of his sorcerous implement.
A glance across the hallway assured me that was true. The wall was smoking at a site two feet removed from the previous. And the crisped area was significantly larger.
I began to suspect that Casey might not plan to honor our new alliance. And I began to reflect on the fact that this particular silver elf wasn't as reluctant as the others to resort to violence.
"Don't expose yourself yet," I told Singe. "This thing's going to pop a couple more times."
Second try wasn't a charm. As before, the fury of the sorcery was considerably lessened. But its aim had shifted since the first flash. I lost most of my stick and got a mild case of roasted knuckles. The lead from the end of my stick was still liquid when I peeked.
We were collecting witnesses now, the older ones probably thinking about launching a raid as soon as the dangerous people got out of the way.
Doris kept whapping the outside wall. That was sure to attract attention out there. Police attention, eventually.
I told Singe, "We probably won't have much more time." But haste could be painful. Or even lethal.
I got down on the floor and slid my arm in to trip the third flash. It was more feeble than the last time I'd done this, though plenty bright enough to have me seeing spots.
Then I recalled Casey having just hopped over the trigger carpet.
Better safe than sorry.
I hopped.
There were no changes in the room behind the door. Casey had returned his possessions to their appointed places. Every item in the place looked precisely positioned.
I had a suspicion that Deal Relway's place would be very much like this.
I looked at the window that wasn't there on the outside of the building. The view it presented was impossible. What it should have shown was the wall of the building next door. Instead, I found myself looking down into the street out front.
Interesting.
Something thumped behind the closed curtain of Casey's bedroom.
"Come in and close the door," I told Singe. "Keep an eye on this window. Look for anybody who might belong to the Guard. Or who just gives you the feeling that they might be trouble." I yanked the curtain aside. And said, "Well, hello."
I'd found some of my missing people. Rhafi and his mother. Kayne was unconscious. So was Rhafi, but he was restless. Neither had a stitch on. Rhafi's clothing lay on the floor, as though discarded by someone undressing in a hurry. Nowhere could I find anything that looked like it might have come off Kayne.
I tried not to get distracted by the still life.
"Hey, Singe. You think you could track somebody's clothes if somebody else was wearing them?"
She stepped over where she could see what I saw. "My." She kept looking back and forth between the window and the naked people. "Well." And, "Can you wake them up?"
I was trying t
o do that already. I wasn't having any luck. I tried to avoid any expression as Singe took her opportunity to inform herself of the nature of human bodies.
"Would you consider the female attractive?" she asked.
With any other woman I know I'd have to consider that a trick or loaded question. Singe, I guessed, actually wanted to know. "Yes, she is. Especially considering her age and the fact that she's borne three children."
Singe becomes horrified whenever she contemplates the size of human babies. Her people have babies in litters of up to eight, the aggregate weight usually being less than that of one human newborn.
"And the male? Is he attractive?"
"Not to me. But that's partly because I know him. He could be attractive to some women." Nature appeared to have blessed Rhafi in one respect. I returned to my question. "Could you track the woman's clothing? I think our villain might've used it to disguise himself."
Singe eyed Rhafi dubiously, looked at me in mild alarm, then shifted her attention to the window. She thought. I kept trying to waken Kayne and her son.
It became obvious that they were under some kind of enchantment that I couldn't penetrate.
After several minutes of silence, Singe told me, "I can follow the horses again."
"Meaning?"
"Following the clothing would be extremely difficult. But I will have no trouble following Mr. Playmate and Mr. Tharpe. Who would have been with or who would have been following what they believed to be this woman." She eyed Rhafi again, growing more uneasy with what she saw.
I opened my mouth to ask a question, then realized that I'd been outreasoned by a ratgirl. A ratgirl who had other things on her mind.
Rhafi was getting more of her eye time than that window was.
Casey had spun the tables on me.
He needed help to get to Kip. He'd told me so. But he didn't want to be anybody's partner. So he became Kayne Prose and lured Playmate and Saucerhead into going where he wanted, where they would, doubtless, fight like lions to defend the lovely Kayne from the villainous silver elves.
"Garrett! Something's happening!"
Dopey me, I glanced at Rhafi first, figuring maybe he was having a happy dream. But nothing to startle Singe was happening there.
"What?"
"The window. It keeps showing different things."
I stepped over.
She was right. It kept alternating between four different live scenes. "Did you touch it? Did you do anything?"
"No! I was over here, looking at... I never thought they were so big... . I was picking at the colored spots on this strange gray stone." She shoved a paw at me. Her whiskers were way back. But she just had to take another look at Rhafi.
I took the "stone." A number of not dissimilar items were scattered around the room. But not nearly so many as there had been during my previous visit. Which suggested that Casey might have taken some with him.
Those elves we'd chased, who'd knocked me out over and over, had used some small fetish or amulet or whatnot to do so. Maybe all those things were different magical devices.
Which got me thinking. We had a small collection back at the house, from that last place where Kip's kidnappers knocked us down, plus those I'd taken away from Rhafi. Should they stay there, dangerously near my partner, when we didn't know their capabilities? Might it not be more useful to surrender them to Colonel Block? That might earn me some obligation points. And might even be a service to the Crown. If these silver elves actually were a sorcerous threat from foreign lands.
Singe made a squealing sound that might have been surprise, fright, dismay, or all three together. I glanced into the other room.
I asked Singe the same question. "Did you touch it? Did you do anything?"
Singe backed out of the room but couldn't stop staring until I closed the curtain. I chuckled but didn't pursue the subject. I did suspect that in future she'd be less inclined toward romantic experimentation.
I thought it might be a good idea to gather up everything of potential interest to the people Block represented because minutes after Singe and I left it, Casey's place was going to get picked clearf.
"Garrett?"
"Uhm?"
"You said tell you if I saw anything interesting?"
"You found Rhafi interesting, did you?"
"Not that." Her tone put me in my place for my having my mind in the gutter. "In the window."
I saw what she meant when the view of the street out front came up.
Three silver elves had taken station across the way. They weren't out in traffic but, even so, you'd think people dressed that weird would attract some notice. That they attracted none whatsoever told me that some sort of enchantment concealed them from passersby but couldn't fool the window's eye.
A hint of a flicker of afterimage indicated that they were pretending to be women. Women who didn't know their ways around. One stared at something in her hand as she swung her partially extended arm right and left.
"We did something to attract Casey's enemies," I said. "And they got here fast. But they still don't quite know where to find him. We'd better get out of here while we can." I squinted at the window when the street view came back up. Did those elves really have waists and breasts? That was a fine crop of nubbins, to be sure, but damned if it didn't look like something was there, putting a little appeal into those elegant silver lines.
43
The silver elves weren't visible anywhere when Singe and I reached the street. I felt them vaguely, though, in the back of my mind.
"Can you smell anything?"
"Something cold... Like what I smelled when we were tracking that boy. But not quite'the same."
"I think that's because this's a different bunch of elves. We have some kind of pyramid here. There's one guy, Casey, who's hunting two guys, Lastyr and Noodiss, because they're wanted for unspecified crimes. Then we have these three elves, evidently all female. In times past they raided Playmate's stable and the Prose flat, trying to lay hands on Kip. Then we have the four who actually did capture Kip. Unless Casey was lying—and his lips weren't moving at the time, on account of he doesn't have any—these people are all involved in criminal enterprises of some sort."
We were moving away from the ugly yellow structure, Singe picking the way, me limping along in her wake lugging a sack filled with trinkets rescued from Casey's digs. I nodded to Doris and Marsha as I passed. I felt the invisible elves start moving behind me.
Singe observed, "Reliance is involved in criminal enterprises. But a lot of his activities don't appear to be morally questionable."
Though she hadn't stated it perfectly I was proud that Singe could reason to that level. "True. The law isn't always about what's right. Or wrong. A lot of times it's about somebody being guaranteed an advantage over somebody else. And that's human nature. That's the nature of any sentient species, I think. Damn! Those invisible people really are moving back there. I get the feeling that they're crossing to Casey's place."
I hoped that was what they were doing, rather than falling in behind us.
They were sure to walk in on some excitement if they went upstairs. I hoped they'd find Casey's place crawling with scavengers and voyeurs.
I said, "I think it might be a good idea if we checked back to see how Rhafi and Kayne are doing, later." Those two could end up in deep trouble if that sleep spell didn't wear off.
"Shush. I need to concentrate."
So now it was me who was the distraction. The triplets weren't because they were keeping their distance, pretending they weren't with me. Good on whichever one of them thought of that. But I needed to toss my swag bag into the cart with Dojango. I wasn't about to carry it forever.
My aches and pains had receded somewhat but they continued to hamper me. I limped and gimped and had no sense of humor at all. I couldn't even work myself into a state of amusement over Singe's recent discombobulation. And that was pretty damned funny. It could become a classic after a few retellings polished it
up.
When our path took us around a corner, thus taking us out of sight of any eyes tagging along behind, I halted. I didn't move until Doris and Marsha appeared.
I tossed my swag bag into Dojango's lap. The results were satisfactory. Rose's enthusiastic barking demonstrated that he had been faking unconsciousness.
I left him to his brothers. Singe and I traveled on into the night, me limping and groaning and demonstrating grand vigor in protesting my determination to find a new way to make a living.
"Where in hell are we going?" I muttered. We'd been walking for hours. It was the middle of the night. I felt every step in every muscle and every joint. We were way up north, passing through neighborhoods where real elves roamed. Singe and I drew stares from folks curious about whether we were a couple. I could've told them that we were a couple of idiots.
This was dangerous country. But if we stuck to the main thoroughfare, the Grand Avenue, we should be all right, partly because it was customarily safe ground, partly because Doris and Marsha were ambling along with us, their clubs dragging the cobblestones and their knuckles threatening to get down there soon.
"I am following the trail, Garrett. I am not creating it." Singe was getting cranky, too. Probably needed to get some food in her.
"This is why I hate working. Once you get started you can't just knock off when you feel like it and have a couple of beers. You've got to keep going until you drop. Why don't you eat one of your sandwiches?"
Singe immediately went to the back of the cart and dug out several. "If it makes you feel better knowing, we are much closer than we were. Their scent is almost fresh. They are less than three hours ahead."
Every silver lining has a cloud.
"That's the godsdamned gate up there!" I grumbled, glaring at an island of light in the far distance. "Please don't tell me they left town."
"All right." Singe sounded troubled. And she should. For ratpeople TunFaire's outer wall constitutes the edge of the world. Go past it and you fall off into the misty void.
The situation wasn't much better for me. I don't like not-city. I don't go outside often. When I do I prefer to visit some rich man's estate, where I can be comfortable while I take care of business. I get back to town as fast as I can.