Dread Brass Shadows Page 13

  I glimmed Easterman’s hangout. It wasn’t far away. Not far enough. Somebody was up top trying to lure a flying thunder-lizard down. I guess Fido wanted to catch him his very own dragon.

  “But he didn’t get the book.”

  “I guess not. I don’t know why. Unless Blaine spotted me and guessed who I was.”

  Curious. Blaine hadn’t had the book when they’d killed him, logically. But he’d had it earlier, and had tried to use it, because he’d been Carla Undo when he’d stumbled into my house. The Serpent couldn’t have it any more than Fido did, else she wouldn’t be trying to kill me. She’d be headed out of town.

  Gnorst? I’d seen no evidence he was even looking. I’d guess he didn’t have it, either.

  So where the hell did it go?

  Why should I care? Tinnie was going to be all right.

  I asked, “You think anybody ought to have that kind of power?”

  “Me, I could handle it. But I don’t know nobody else I’d trust.”

  “And I don’t know about you.”

  “How much you pay me not to find it?”

  “What?”

  “I come to the city for the money, Garrett. Not to save the world.”

  “I like a straightforward thinker. I like a girl who has her priorities straight and knows what she wants. I’ll give you a straight answer. Not a copper. You don’t have a glimmer where it is.”

  “But I will I find things real good. Tell you what. When I find it, I’ll give you a chance to outbid Lubbock.”

  “And the Serpent? You maybe ought to think about that some. While you’re at it, think about what happened to Blaine.”

  “That’s no problem.”

  “Look, Winger, it’s stupid not to be scared. There’s some bad people in this town. And you got some of the baddest looking for you. On account of Squirrel. If they catch up with you, you can kiss your tail good-bye.” I mentioned it because once again I’d glimpsed somebody who looked like Crask.

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “I saw, when you tried to jump me.”

  “Damn it, Garrett, I’m not your responsibility. Back off”

  Something about the way she flared there, and her choice of words, made me wonder if the Winger I was seeing was the real Winger. “All right. All right. Tell me where those dwarves went.”

  “Twenty marks.”

  “Mercenary bitch. You’d sell your own mother.”

  “If the price was right. Two marks. To cover expenses. Won’t do you much good. She’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, she’s still breathing. She’s just been dead from the chin up for the last thirty years. All she knows how to do is whine and bitch and make babies. Sixteen, last time I counted. Probably a couple more by now. Her almost bleeding to death having the fourteenth, then keeping on pumping them out, was what made up my mind I didn’t want to be like her”

  “Twenty marks.” I didn’t blame her. Peasants live short and ugly lives, uglier for the women. Maybe she didn’t have anything to lose, considering. “But I don’t have it on me right now.”

  “I’ll trust you. They say your word is good. Just don’t get yourself croaked before I can collect.”

  “So talk to me. Where are they?”

  “You going there right now?”

  “Yeah. If you tell me.”

  “Mind if I just show you? Might find me something interesting, too.”

  25

  We’d hardly begun walking. Suddenly people started running around cackling at each other like the world’s biggest chicken herd. They didn’t act scared, they just wanted to know what was happening. Me too, you bet. I got no sense from the confusion till everybody stopped, faced the same way, and pointed.

  The shadows came first, rippling over us. Then came the monsters, out of the morning sun, a good dozen of them. Instead of drifting way up high, they were down at rooftop level, wing tip to wing tip, necks snaky and heads darting around. They screeched as they went over. MorCartha appeared from nowhere, diving for safety below.

  Nobody panicked. There ‘was no cause. Those things were big but not massive. They couldn’t carry anyone off. Maybe a cat or small dog. They didn’t have the wing power to go flapping away with anything heavier.

  Somebody nearby observed, “They’re cleaning out the pigeons.” Which was why their heads were darting around. “One comes along ahead of the others and flushes those feathered rats, then the rest get them on the fly.”

  Somebody else said, “I hear they’s a bunch of the big meat-eaters in the hills up north.”

  Grimmer news, that. Some of those critters stand thirty feet tall, weigh a dozen tons, and snack on mammoths. The farmers would be in for some excitement. I told Winger, “There you go, you want to make money. I know a guy pays prime rates for thunder-lizard hides.” Willard Tate used thunder-lizard leather for the soles of army boots.

  Winger spat. “Easier money here.” Like I’d made a serious suggestion. Not subtle, friend Winger.

  We started moving again. When we hit a quiet stretch, she said, “I didn’t know you had those things around here.”

  “We don’t. Usually. Something must be pushing them south. They don’t like it down here. Too cold and unfriendly.”

  Which sparked a thought. If there were big carnivores rampaging through the hills, they wouldn’t last. One chilly night and that would be that. The farmers would sneak around and feed them a few hundred pounds of poisoned steel while they were too sluggish to protect themselves Then Old Man Tate would find himself with more hides than he could handle.

  One reason thunder-lizards stay away from the sapient races is they always get the dirty end They’re pretty dim, but they’ve learned that Teeth and claws and mass are only so much use against brains and sorcery and sharp, poisoned steel.

  Which is another reason we didn’t see much fear. Not to mention the fact that TunFaire is surrounded by a wall no thunder-lizard could climb.

  The excitement made it difficult to tell if we were being tailed, by Fido’s boys or Chodo’s. I took it for granted we had company. I worried more about Easterman’s clowns than Chodo’s troops. The latter would be pros. They’d be predictable. All I knew about the brunos was that they could be deadly.

  As we walked I hammered away at Winger, trying to get through. She couldn’t believe things were as black as I claimed. She didn’t understand how potent the Book of Dreams could be. Or she didn’t want to.

  We’d just passed Lettie Faren’s cathouse, which clings to the skirts of the Hill like a malignant parasite, and I’d started telling Winger a story about something that had happened there. I was worried about the woman. She didn’t get the chuckle she should have. . . . Sadler stepped out of an alley. Just for a second. Nothing special to someone who didn’t know him. But I knew him. I glanced back. I doubted any tail would have spotted him.

  He wanted to talk to me. Did I want to talk to him? Particularly, did I want to walk down a dark alley with him?

  Well, maybe I could get him off my tail. “Winger, I got to see a man about a dog. Hang on a minute.” I headed toward that alley hitching my pants. Watchers would buy it if I didn’t take all day.

  I was at a disadvantage stepping out of the brightness into shadow. If Sadler wanted me, he had me. I said, “Make it fast

  “Right. Heard you had a close scrape.”

  “Yeah. Dwarves. Again.”

  “I heard. That the woman we been looking for?”

  “The very one. Only she didn’t cut Squirrel. I think I know who did. Brunos who work for a guy called Fido Easterman.”

  He snickered. “Fido?”

  “It’s an imperial title. Don’t make mock. Yeah. He’s crazy as a platoon of loons. Real candidate for the ha-ha house. Got a place up the Hill looks like a haunted castle. Wants to be an evil sorcerer.”

  “He isn’t?”

  “Like a stone isn’t. He’s just crazy. Maybe it’s his business. Metal smeltin
g. Maybe he’s breathed too many fumes off the crucibles. He’s got four brunos that I spotted. Not first water. I think he went for cheap over competent.”

  Sadler clicked his tongue, looked thoughtful. He seemed distracted. Odd. He’d wanted to talk to me, not the other way around.

  I said, “There’s a good chance they offed Blaine, too.”

  Sadler clicked again, looked even more thoughtful. Maybe he was turning into a philosophical cricket. It could happen. Stranger things have.

  “What?” I asked. Impatient me. Just because a whiz don’t take twenty minutes.

  “These guys are second rate, eh?”

  “Looked it to me.” Was he paying attention?

  “What about that door? Who cut Squirrel so deep? Somebody with a little strength, eh?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah. I guess.”

  “You guess. That’s you, Garrett. Guessing and stumbling around in the dark till you fall over something. Reason I wanted to talk to you, we got a line on some dwarves. Probably won’t do you no good. They was in a big dust-up down on the Landing. Dwarfish gang fight. One bunch jumped another bunch. After, some headed for Dwarf Fort, some headed toward the Bledsoe. I’d call it a draw, far as how it turned out. I got some guys trying to track the ones went toward the hospital. Thought you’d want to know.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” I forgot to mention Winger and I were on a trail. Better to have the hard boys headed somewhere else. “This is turning into the longest leak in history. Anybody was watching me they’d be getting suspicious.”

  “You worry too much. Crask can handle them. But go on. Catch you later.” He drifted into shadow, taking his aura of menace with him.

  “Yeah. Later.” I stomped out of there hitching my pants and shaking my head.

  Winger said, “You must have a five-gallon bladder, Garrett.” She was breathing heavy.

  “Yeah. Something happen?”

  She gave me a mocking smile. “Nothing I couldn’t handle. Some guy tried to pick me up. I discouraged him.”

  “Oh. Let’s move.” I wanted to see what I could see before Chodo’s boys stumbled into my way. Always seemed to be people turning up dead when they did.

  Winger seemed disappointed that I didn’t have any banter or follow-up questions about her encounter. I shrugged it off.

  It was hard to make any speed. The streets had filled with people gawking at the pigeon exterminators. One glided over, pathfinding. I said, “I hear those things only go thirty, forty pounds.” This one went right over the Tate compound, which wasn’t far away. I wondered if Tinnie was watching, too. For no reason I could finger I was feeling blue.

  “Cheer up, Garrett. We’ll find that book and get rich.”

  Or dead. Lots more likely dead.

  26

  The longer we walked the more certain I became that I’d have to renegotiate with Winger. I glanced at her, big as me, strutting along like she dared the world to take its best shot. Something about her unjustified cockiness appealed to me. Give her a dose of sense, she might be all right.

  “Hey, Winger. That twenty isn’t an open offer. I won’t buy a pig in a poke. You got to deliver dwarves.”

  “No cat in this bag, Garrett. You’ll get dwarves.”

  Cat and pig, both expressions come from an old country con. Once upon a time peasants took piglets to market in a ‘poke.’ Some grifter got the idea of stuffing the bag with a cat and selling it to somebody gullible enough not to look inside before he handed over his money. So. Pig in a poke, cat out of the bag.

  I wanted dwarves. I got them. But not exactly in mint condition.

  “What’s going on?” Winger muttered. People were milling around a tenement that had seen its best days a hundred years before I was born People who weren’t interested in the ongoing airshow.

  “Trouble,” I told her. “Past tense Else we’d have a desert here.”

  “Ghouls?”

  “You could say that.”

  She pushed through the crowd, not caring who she shoved or elbowed She was mad, perfectly willing to get in a fight. I wondered if I ought to be around somebody who had herself a war on with the whole world.

  The first dead dwarf lay sprawled in the tenement entrance, hacked and stabbed and twisted up into an unnatural position. He clutched the hilt of a broken knife. “Got swamped in a rush, looks like,” I said. “Anybody see it happen?” I’m a dreamer.

  The nearest vultures looked at me like I was crazy. I shrugged, pushed inside. No crowd in there, which suggested the folks outside expected city busybodies any minute. People not worried about the Watch would have been inside collecting anything the dead couldn’t use anymore.

  The Watch seldom bothers doing much policing or chasing, but they do grab folks found on the scene, then make life miserable for them. I told Winger, “We’d better do this quick.”

  “Do what?” She sounded depressed. I supposed she was thinking about all the things she couldn’t buy with the money I wasn’t going to pay her.

  “Look the place over. See what’s to be seen.”

  “Why? All you’re going to see is more dead guys.”

  She had a point. There was another on the first floor landing and three in the hallway on the second. Two of those may have been attackers. They were better kempt, better clad. Gnorst’s bunch.

  The fight had proceeded along the hallway, scourged a half-dozen sleeping rooms, and tumbled down a cramped rear stairwell. None of the rooms had doors. Most had been torn apart by somebody in a hurry looking for something. We found a ratman and a dwarf, both critically wounded and a lot of nothing else. I asked, “Was this the place you wanted to sell me?”

  “Sure was.” Still depressed.

  “You tried.”

  “That don’t put money in my pocket. What’s that racket?” She meant the yelling out front.

  “Watch must be coming. People telling each other to make themselves invisible. Which isn’t such a bad idea.” I stomped down the back stairway. Behind me, Winger muttered about her luck couldn’t turn worse if she prayed. Her vocabulary wasn’t unique or imaginative, but it was colorful.

  The back way out featured a broken door. I squeezed through. The mess beyond suggested somebody tried to hold Gnorst’s dwarves there while the renegades made their getaway. One of Gnorst’s dwarves lay partially buried in litter, alive enough to groan. I tried asking him questions. If he spoke any Karentine, he was too involved in his own misery to respond. He did manage one dwarfish outburst filled with fireworks, the only word of which I caught was “ogre.” I told Winger, “This one will be all right. If the Watch don’t lynch him just to make believe they’re doing something useful.”

  “I think they’re in the building.” There was a racket inside.

  “Time to go Watch your step.” TunFaire’s alleys serve many unplanned uses, especially those of trash dump and public relief facility. The quality of cleanup attention they get from the city ratmen declines as one moves farther from the Hill. What the lords don’t see don’t exist. We were far from the hub of the wheel here, in a stretch so foul it boasted no homeless tenants.

  A Watchman stepped into our path as we approached the street. Being a naturally courteous kind of guy, I’d let Winger go first The Watchman was about five six and tricked out in those gaudy blues and reds, a pretty little devil who got him a nasty grin when he saw he had somebody boxed. He started to say something.

  What did he want to say? Who the hell knows? Winger grabbed him by the throat, planted one on his nose, hoisted him up, and flipped him into the mess behind us. Like he weighed about six pounds. I wanted to gawk but knew it wouldn’t work. He had friends. “Bright move, Winger. Real bright.” I hoped he hadn’t seen me well enough to know me if we met again.

  I put the old heels and toes to work doing what the gods intended and didn’t slow down till I was ten blocks away. Huffing, puffing, snorting like a bilious dragon, I looked for Winger. Not a sign of her. She’d gone her own way. Which
was maybe an excellent idea and one I ought to hope she’d pursue indefinitely. A guy could get hurt hanging around with people like her.

  27

  I trust the light was feeble there, the Dead Man sent Winger’s behavior amused him. Is there any likelihood the Watchman recognized you?

  “Why should he?”

  You are a known character.

  That sack of petrified lard was worried about losing his free ride!

  He wouldn’t have admitted it if I’d set a fire under him but the truth smoldered through. If he lost me, he might actually have to work to keep a roof over his head. There’s nothing in this world he loathes more than work.

  The fact that he was worried worried me. It was out of character. I take my life in my hands every time I go sniffing around after the bad boys. That never bothered him before. It got me thinking and that’s always dangerous. Wondering if he hadn’t had some premonition. Wouldn’t surprise me to find he could peek into the future. Especially after the way he’d been guessing what Glory Mooncalled would do.

  “What’s happened?” I thought it a perfectly reasonable query. He ignored it. “Be that way, then.” I took my question to Dean.

  “Nothing,” Dean told me “Except that he did hint that he was getting something like a black vibration out of the Cantard. I think he meant he felt something happening down there.”

  “Oh, my. It’d have to be big.” Oh, my, oh, my.

  I couldn’t believe it was anything but imagination. Dead men got nothing to do but fantasize. But . . . If something that big was happening, it had to involve Glory Mooncalled.

  When the going gets tough, the tough get going. When the going gets tough, Garrett puts his feet up and has a beer. I took a pitcher into the office and snuggled up with Eleanor. We had us a chat about whether or not I had any obligation, anywhere, now I could be sure Tinnie was going to be all right. Eleanor didn’t have much to say, but somewhere along the way, after things got a little dizzy, I recalled that I’d taken on a client, a wee lovely who thought me finding an improbable book could save her father’s bacon.