Wicked Bronze Ambition Read online

  Penny showed up with fresh tea. She was surprised to see the size of the crowd. Dean had not warned her. I expected her to flee to the Dead Man’s room, her own, or to the kitchen, but she just backed off to the doorway and asked, “What’s going on?”

  Old Bones handled the updates. His responsibility, after all. She was his pet.

  28

  I shut the door behind Tara Chayne. That bastion of insensitivity was last to leave, hinting that she needed me to see her safely home.

  His Nibs assured me that what she wanted was exactly what I suspected.

  He observed, None of those people knew anything about Strafa’s killer and not much of value about the Tournament of Swords. Only Lady Tara Chayne is completely convinced that a new tournament is in the works. The others are taking it seriously only because Strafa is dead.

  Well, hell. Did they think somebody was working a scam?

  That could be, though I had some doubts after my encounters.

  The scam thesis remains on the table.

  He, too, had trouble accepting that anyone would really believe that a Tournament of Swords could be managed under contemporary conditions. “There are people with the talent to run a game on the Hill crowd, but do any of them have the guts?” The consequences could be grim. Might as well mess with Deal Relway or Belinda Contague. Your death would be easier.

  It is deserving of reflection. Though not rational, initiation of a tournament is not rational, either.

  He shuffled the clutter inside my head. He did the same with Penny and Singe, Belinda and John Stretch, then proclaimed the obvious.

  There is something missing.

  “There is a lot that’s missing. Like any sense. We’ve established that already.”

  He began to muse, allowing the rest of us the rare treat of witnessing the process. It is intriguing to see how his minds work. He sorted through speculations that were entirely ridiculous, like Strafa and Vicious Min having been struck by accidental discharges or having been attacked because of a case of mistaken identity.

  He knew the ideas were absurd but wanted to test every conceivable notion. The truth might appear just as absurd at first blush.

  The others drank beer and didn’t say much. I went to the Dead Man’s room and did the same. Penny came in to work on one of her paintings.

  I tried picking at the edges of the mistaken identity notion, couldn’t make it hold water. Strafa had been attacked deliberately, no doubt about it. Vicious Min had been injured at the same time.

  I must see this woman. Race and Dex, as well, but Min most of all, as soon as it can be arranged.

  “You’ve found a thread?”

  Perhaps. It has occurred to me to wonder why a Dread Companion, supposedly conjured from a supernatural realm and the only such creature so far actually noted, would arrive before the tournament began. And would then hire persons in your own trade to follow your movements. There is something odd about that.

  “Race and Dex? Are you sure? I don’t see how they could give us anything. I grilled them good today.”

  You did indeed. And they may be empty vessels. But it is equally possible that they know something unrelated to what you asked that they did not report, either, and that might reflect obliquely on the situation.

  I was skeptical. Those two were neither heart nor soul of the Algarda family operation. They cooked and cleaned.

  For example, we assumed that Strafa was coming home when she was attacked. But was she, in fact? Could she have been at home already and was called out? Might she have just gone to see why Vicious Min was loitering out front? Do we know anything about that woman that she did not tell other witnesses herself?

  “You could be right. Min told Barate . . .”

  Yes. But.

  We had only Min’s word for anything involving Vicious Min.

  The more I think about this demon woman, the more I want to make her acquaintance. She may have had a hand in the assassination. Perhaps she had some bad luck, got hurt, got caught, but because there were no contradicting witnesses, she recouped her fortunes with a tall tale delivered before she passed out from loss of blood.

  That is what he does. He sees things from an unlikely angle. That scenario fit the facts. I stipulated as much. “But why would she have me watched?” Preston Womble had known no whys. He had known only that a man needed money to buy food and pay the rent and someone had given him cash to do what he knew how to do best. Elona Muriat would have known nothing more than he did.

  I recalled hungry times when I worked under the same blind circumstances. Every client lied about why the job needed doing.

  The deception came with the life. You got used to it.

  Womble and Muriat are unemployed now. We might lure them here with a job offer.

  “Won’t work. They won’t have anything to do with me.”

  We will not send you. Have Miss Winger collect the woman. Have Mr. Tharpe . . . No. He is well known as an associate of yours. Mr. Playmate would be better, if his health is up to the legwork. Failing him, try Jon Salvation or Mr. Kolda. They might find the prospect exciting. Mr. Womble or Miss Muriat should not connect this neighborhood with you till they are too close to make their escape.

  Only if they hadn’t done their homework. I’d been living with Strafa when Vicious Min sicced them on me. Damn! Those two could turn out to be gold mines in the land of things we didn’t know we knew.

  29

  Saucerhead and Winger were onto the payroll, Tharpe definitely doing nothing connected with Womble or Muriat. The Dead Man had him doing courier duty. His first job was to inform Race and Dex that their presence was required here. Mr. Tharpe would show them the way.

  I was off to see Playmate, to see if he would lead Preston Womble to the Dead Man. If his health was too fragile, I’d move on to Kolda, whose apothecary shop was just blocks from Playmate’s stable. I wanted to see Play even if he couldn’t help. I wanted to know what he had seen that night in the Dream Quarter.

  Maybe he had noticed something that Penny hadn’t.

  Plus, I wanted to see how he was feeling. I hadn’t had a chance at the funeral or wake.

  He had been on the road to a hard death from an aggressive cancer. The combined efforts of Kolda, the Dead Man, and a healing priest named Hoto Pepper had licked that evil, barely. I hoped Play was still out in front of it. He was one of my better friends. And I liked him, which isn’t always the case with some of the people we’ve known for donkey’s years. He was one of the good guys, righteous in the sense that the word was designed.

  I seemed to have the streets to myself, all by my lonesome. I started out as alert as on a patrol into Venageta’s slice of the island swamps. No one showed any interest in me, nor did I smell one. Neither friend, foe, nor Guardsman gave himself away.

  I liked that but found it curious.

  I followed Macunado east for a while, walked four blocks sideways to Magnolia, took that east to Prince Guelfo Square. That isn’t much bigger than a hankie. I stopped to visit Frenkeljean the sausage vendor and had a juicy hot sausage on a bun with masses of raw onion, checking my surroundings while dripping grease everywhere. Frenkeljean sees stuff. He functions more like furniture than people. Folks pay no attention. He has the added camouflage of being only part human.

  He is a stringer for Deal Relway, too. I saw him inside the Al-Khar once, reporting. He didn’t see me.

  I asked a few soft questions, mostly out of curiosity. I really was there mainly for the sausage.

  If Strafa had a downside, it was her passion for healthy food. I could never convince her that big fat bratwursts in quantity were real good eating.

  Seizing the day, I treated myself to another. Stomach bulging and happy, I resumed my approach to Playmate’s stable, now confident that I was not the drum major for another parade. I paid no attention to the dogs that were out. The city has its strays, always there, like rat people, seldom noticed.

  Could the lack of interest in me be be
cause somebody really clever had tagged me with a sorcery-based tagalong tracer? Or was it just what it seemed? Nobody cared anymore.

  No boost for the ego, that. It meant that everyone, friend and foe, had found something better to do. I was old news.

  Even my own life can’t be all about me.

  I was in the last stretch, headed up a slight hill, puffing and telling myself that I really had to do something to get in shape.

  My best exercise happens mostly inside the gymnasium of my mind.

  Despite my determination to maintain a level-one alert, I did not, for some time, realize that I was no longer operating alone.

  30

  I had acquired a shaggy brown twenty-pound mongrel sidekick who had taken station at my right ankle like he had been there forever and that was the meaning of life.

  “Head on out, dog. You’re too old to hook me with cute.”

  He awarded me the doggy equivalent of an adoring smile. I noted that he was actually a she. So what? A mutt is a mutt. I don’t have much use for any of them.

  My brother Mikey brought strays home all the time. Mom put up with it, too, though they usually “ran away” within a few days. Mikey never could do any wrong.

  She would have fits if I brought a critter home. Of course, mine were way cooler. A baby mastodon, maybe. Or a raptor thunder lizard. One of the little ones that only come up to your hip and mostly eat rats and cats.

  Another sign of the times. We hardly ever see those anymore.

  That dog was definitely female. She did not hear a thing she didn’t want to hear. She just got on with escorting me to whatever destination pleased me.

  I growled under my breath. Brownie growled right back, making good-natured conversation. “Brownie” because I’m so clever, though Spots would have done the job, too. She had a white patch on her throat and another on her left hind leg. Her tail had been broken.

  While I was cataloging her charms, another four-legged lady usurped the place of honor on my left. She was the same size but had a ration of bulldog in her background. She was charming in a maximum ugly kind of way. She did not appear to have a pleasant personality like Brownie.

  She suffered from the same hearing disorder.

  I was a hundred yards from Playmate’s stable. I would hunker down there, see if somebody had slipped a steak into my pocket. I saw Play his own self chatting up a customer looking to board a horse. The nag glanced my way. She made an unhappy noise.

  Here we go. They’re all out to get me. Nobody believes me, but I never find any proof to the contrary. This mare wasn’t issuing a challenge, though. She was just unhappy because she had to be in the same street as that horrid Garrett creature.

  Yeah. She knew who I was. She recognized me. Those monsters are connected telepathically.

  Little Moo charged out of a dark breezeway. She hit me full speed. She had on the outfit she’d worn in the cemetery. She had nothing new to say. “Hate you! Hate you!” She pounded my chest with her fists.

  The dogs danced around us, excited but not really taking sides.

  Playmate came running.

  I got hold of the girl, tossed her over my shoulder, went to meet him, whereupon he proved that he wasn’t going to be any help at all. “Put her down and turn her loose, Garrett. People are watching.”

  He had a point. Folks aren’t always sympathetic to a guy in his thirties lugging a young girl who is kicking and screaming, even when her racket makes it sound like a domestic dispute. The mob might sort me out and consult the facts later, which would give the girl a great head start.

  Folks there were slow, though, maybe on account of the dogs. There were four of those now, and they were turning the excitement into a great doggie celebration. They yapped. They yipped. They bounced up and down happily. How could any of that be part of an abduction?

  I blathered loud nonsense about how Mom was going to blow her top this time. I put the girl down but hung on to her right hand, which was small, pudgy, and hot. We ducked into Playmate’s place.

  Play brought his customer and the man’s steed inside while muttering, “Kids these days.” Then, “Dogs in the office, Gee, not around with the horses.”

  Gee?

  I herded hounds, never turning loose of my new young friend. The mutts were cooperative, the girl just passive. She seemed ashamed now. She kept her eyes downcast and moved sleepily.

  She was set to bolt the instant she saw an opening.

  I shut the door to the street.

  The dogs all sat or lay down. Brownie settled on her belly in front of the street exit, chin on paws, looking worshipful. The others were not so friendly.

  Brownie seemed to be the boss female.

  I asked the girl, “What’s your name?” Still hanging on to her hand.

  She looked at me like the question confused her, then down at the floor. “Hate you,” she said with little force.

  “Not much of a vocabulary, sweetie.” I planted her in a chair, stepped away. She wiggled around before she decided she was comfortable.

  “No name, eh? Where do you live, then?”

  That one appeared to be as tough as the one about her name.

  “All right, then. Who are your mom and dad?”

  Zip. Nothing. I asked a few more, none of which produced any information other than a sense that she didn’t understand what she was being asked. She did, sadly, softly, once remind me that she hated me, but then each question made her shrink in on herself a little more, leaving her a touch more embarrassed.

  Playmate joined us. He was not in the most cheerful mood. “I had to lie about you to close that deal, Garrett. So what the dickens do we have here? What’s going on?”

  “I’d cheerfully tell all if I had a clue.”

  He settled behind an actual desk that took up about a fifth of the room, faced the girl across its wooden plain. That desk had come to him from his brother-in-law in a debt settlement. The brother-in-law had a history of failures achieved after showing amazing promise, energy, and enthusiasm in the organization and financing of bold new ventures.

  Play’s expression was skeptical. He gave me the fish-eye, then the girl in the cow costume, and the same to all four dogs, every one absurdly quiet and well behaved. Brownie hid her eyes behind a paw.

  I said, “I came over to ask about your trip to the Dream Quarter with Penny. And to see how you’re doing. And to offer you a small job helping find the people who attacked Strafa. You know what happened with Little Moo. You watched it happen.”

  He could not deny that. But he wasn’t quite ready to take that at face value. He grunted and waited for me to talk myself into or out of something.

  “Things happen around me. Weird things.” Things that sometimes sweep up my friends with the dust and clutter.

  “Play, I don’t know this girl. I’ll happily leave her for the Reverend Playmate to sort out. I just want to know if you saw something that Penny missed because she was busy being a priestess.”

  “Strafa wasn’t down there, Garrett. We would have noticed. The turnout was the worst I’ve ever seen. Religion is dying.”

  “In TunFaire? This is the most god-ridden city there ever was.”

  “In TunFaire. There are empty temples on the low end of the Street of the Gods today. The little cults can’t make the rent.”

  Brownie lifted her chin half an inch and cracked an eye like she wondered if one of the two-leggers might do something interesting. Maybe food would be involved.

  In a whisper, bashfully, Little Moo reminded me, “Hate you.”

  “That’s all she’ll say, Play. Not why. Not her name. Nothing about her family. I don’t know if she even understands the questions.”

  Playmate stood and leaned forward, over the desk. He had his gentlest look on, but even after the cancer had depleted him so badly, he was huge and intimidating.

  Brownie opened her other eye and made a sound meant to communicate something somehow, but I did not get it.

  Playm
ate suggested, “Maybe she’s slow?”

  “It don’t seem like she’s been abused.”

  Slow girls on their own don’t last long. Maybe this one was doing all right because she lived in the new, law-hagridden TunFaire sprung from the nightmares behind Deal Relway’s forehead.

  Playmate settled back. “Is there someone else who could help if I turn you down?”

  “I was thinking Kolda since he’s close by.”

  “Anyone else? His old lady keeps him on a short leash since the mix-up with the zombie makers.”

  They hadn’t been zombie makers, but I knew what he meant so I didn’t correct him. “You see him much these days?”

  “He keeps me in the stuff I need to fight the cancer. I buy him dinner at the Grapevine when Trudi lets him out. Who else do you have?”

  “Jon Salvation?”

  “Probably not your best choice.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’d do it. He’d jump at a chance to be part of another adventure.”

  I scowled. Did he know something about Salvation that I didn’t?

  “Really, Garrett. Whatever it is to you, it would be an adventure to him.”

  “You could be right.” It would all be part of a story to Jon Salvation. It would turn up in some future play. And while he was involved in real events, he would be trying to do revisions and rewrites, heading west.

  Play announced, “I have animals that need me. And now I have this,” meaning Little Moo. “If you can’t get Kolda, or anybody else, then come back. We’ll find a workaround.”

  Beer crossed my mind. I hadn’t had any yet today. Why think about it now? Playmate was no drinker. He might not have any on the premises. Then I got what my subconscious was trying to tell me. “I could try Max Weider or Manvil Gilbey. Preston would get all excited if he thought he had a shot at working for the brewery.”

  “And there you go. So take on off. I’ll try to get something out of her.” Then, before I actually got rolling, he told me, “I don’t know what to say, Garrett. I hurt for you so bad. What happened has tested my faith. That girl was the best thing that ever happened to you. I guess I should thank God that you had her in your life for as long as you did.”