Dread Brass Shadows Read online

  Gnorst nodded. “Agreed. So?”

  “You think finding out would make me more dangerous to somebody?”

  “Possibly. Not many non-dwarves know the story. Even among us it’s mostly forgotten. It has been said by the wise, knowledge is dangerous.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Sneaking up on something, Mr. Garrett?”

  I thought some before I explained. I wanted it to stay airborne when I shoved it out of the nest, though it would never soar. “The bad boys paid me no attention before I came down here. They’ve been trying to kill me ever since I walked back out. Makes a guy wonder. How was I different? How did they know? Not to mention how come is it that all these skirmishes between dwarf gangs keep turning out inconclusive?”

  Gnorst darkened behind his face fur. He started pacing. “I did hear about you being attacked up the street. I didn’t put it together before. Yes. I see your point. One of your points. They weren’t keeping an eye on you, but all of a sudden, they knew you’d seen me and had become a danger Though it leaves me embarrassed and ashamed, Mr. Garrett, I must admit that it looks like one of my people is an informer.”

  Putting it mildly. “That’s my guess.”

  “Out of curiosity, Mr. Garrett, how is it that you’re alive to visit me again? I would think that dwarfish efficiency would extend to setting an ambush.

  “I got lucky. Chodo Contague’s men turned up the first time. Second time I started running before they started sniping. I hope there won’t be a next time. I hope they’re on the run from whoever has been hitting their hideouts.”

  He chuckled. It wasn’t a nice sound. It was a noise something like the glug-glug of water coming from a ten-gallon bottle crossed with fingernails scraping a slate board.

  “I don’t find any of this amusing.”

  “I’m sure you don’t, Mr. Garrett. What are you doing?”

  I was sneaking toward the edge of the roof. “Somebody’s been following me I thought I might get a look at him from here.”

  I didn’t, though. It was so damned dark down there he could have danced in the street without me getting a look I lied, “So that’s mainly the reason I came by. To let you know I think you’ve got a spy on board.”

  Gnorst grunted irritably. My experience is, his kind are naturally crabby. Gnorst was a paragon of manners and patience. Maybe that was why he was the local boss dwarf. He told me, “You didn’t bring me any news I wanted to hear. Now I have to deal with it.”

  It’s hard to read a being who grew up in an alien culture yet looks human enough to make you jump to conclusions. But I had a strong suspicion Gnorst was a lot less unhappy than he wanted me to believe. Maybe he thought having a renegade handy was an asset. I could think of ways that would be true.

  “I know what you mean. I’ve been a regular fountain of bad news all day. Everywhere I go I’m telling somebody something they don’t want to hear.”

  We fenced awhile with words. He wouldn’t give up a thing I could use. I surrendered to the inevitable, told him I was going to go dump it all on the Dead Man. He let me go without another word. He wasn’t as gracious as he’d been. That questionable attitude infected my guide. The dwarf took no pains to make my passage through the place a comfort.

  I froze the moment I hit the street, looked around carefully. Garrett don’t get bitten by the same snake twice. I saw nothing. Even so, I moved away ready for anything.

  Nothing ever happens when you’re ready.

  The silence overhead seemed almost ominous. The morCartha had retired, for whatever reason. I almost missed them. They had become part of city life.

  29

  I had the night to myself. Unless you count sharing with a tail. It wasn’t a happy feeling. Empty streets always mean trouble to me.

  Whoever was after me was spooky. I only ever knew one guy that good, Pokey Pigotta. Maybe this was Pokey’s ghost.

  I’d outthought Pokey once when he’d been on me. Maybe I could use the trick again. It was hard to beat for a guy working alone. I looked for a busy tavern I knew would have a back door.

  Not my day. It didn’t work. I didn’t catch anybody sliding in the front door by sprinting around from the back. It was like the guy was psychic. All I accomplished was to let whoever know I knew he was there. Go match wits with a rock, Garrett. Chances are the rock will come out ahead.

  Having somebody dog you works on your head. You start out wondering who and why. Pretty soon you’re into what if and then imagination flares and you’ve got a vampire or werewolf or ghoul pack just waiting for you to walk down a dark alley with your eyes closed.

  There ain’t no comforting thoughts, come a dark night.

  Hell with the clown. Let him walk his behind off. He didn’t seem interested in messing with me, just in seeing what I got me up to. If I kept moving, he’d have no time to report to whoever sicked him on me.

  I was tired and depressed and short on zest for life. Maybe even a little cranky. I get that way when things keep on not going my way. Call me spoiled.

  I was near the Bledsoe Infirmary, a charity hospital supported by surviving descendants of the old imperial family, when I sensed a change in the night. It wasn’t obvious, just a difference. Nothing I could pin down. My shadow was there still. The morCartha weren’t making much racket. Random flying thunder-lizards still ghosted overhead, chasing bats. The streets remained underpopulated. I wondered if it might not be some holiday among the night people

  I paused to consider the Bledsoe, a monument to good intentions having become a symbol of despair. A place of fear, where the poor went to die and the mad screamed out their souls in overcrowded, locked wards. The imperial family did all they could, but their best wasn’t enough. Their money and donations of labor barely kept it from falling down. It was huge, gray, ugly, and may have been imposing in its prime, a couple of hundred years ago. Now it was just another shabby old building, bigger than but no better than ten thousand others in TunFaire.

  I shook my head, startled by an original thought. I couldn’t recall ever having seen new construction anywhere in the city Was the war that big a drain on resources?

  The war is the most important thing in all our lives, whether or not we’re directly involved. It shapes our selves and surroundings and forges our futures as every minute passes.

  Whatever was happening in the Cantard, so heroic the Dead Man could sense it from here, would have a crashing impact on all our lives.

  That scared me. I’m not fond of things the way they are, but the only changes I can see will be for the worse. The bigger the change, the more for the worse.

  Some tiny sound reached me, some ghostly flicker of motion teased the corner of my vision. I’d been a step too far away from here and now realized it, and my reaction was maybe more vigorous than it should have been. I did me a wild roundhouse kick toward the movement, brought my foot down, ducked and pivoted and lashed the air with a knife.

  Crask was saved by the fact that my tippytoe brushed his chin lightly, pushing him back. He’d thrown himself away at the same time. Now he sat on his duff looking up at me with a goofy expression.

  “Say . . .” he said. “Say. What’s wrong with you?”

  I had so much juice in me so sudden I started shaking. I’d blown it, really. I took some deep breaths to calm me down, put the knife away, extended a hand. “Sorry. You startled me bad.”

  “Yeah? Well, you got no call . . .” I shut up as he reached with his left hand. I didn’t like the look in his eye. I pulled my hand back before he grabbed it and went to chewing on it.

  He got up slowly, using only his left hand. I noticed he had his right arm strapped to his stomach. “What happened to you?” Hard to tell in that light but his face looked a little worse for wear, too. He looked less intimidating than usual.

  He got up slowly, rubbed his behind. Damn, he looked embarrassed! Maybe it was the light leaking from the Bledsoe . . . He didn’t have an answer.

  I lea
ped to a conclusion. He’d been the guy Winger had discouraged when Sadler had me in that alley. No proof, and he’d never tell, but by damn I’d put money on it. A copper or two, anyway. I grinned. “You shouldn’t ought to sneak up that way.”

  “I didn’t sneak. I walked right into you, Garrett.”

  I didn’t argue. You don’t with a Crask or Sadler. “What you doing here?”

  “Looking for you. Your man said you were headed for Dwarf Fort. I come down this way figuring you’d be headed back by now.”

  I was going to have to have a talk with Dean. Though it was understandable he’d answer Crask’s questions if Crask put on his nasty face. “What’s up?”

  “Couple things. You seen Sadler?”

  “Not since . . . Not for a long time. Why?”

  “Disappeared.” Crask didn’t waste many words. “Come to see Chodo right after . . .” He wasn’t going to talk about the incident. “Talked some, then went away. Nobody seen him go Wasn’t told he was supposed to. Nobody’s seen him since. Chodo’s concerned.”

  Chodo was concerned. That would be an understatement, as were most statements about the kingpin. In language the rest of us would use, it meant Chodo was mightily pissed.

  I don’t usually volunteer information, especially to the kingpin’s people, but I made an exception. “Guys have been disappearing all over I can’t find a trace of Morley Dotes. Likewise Saucerhead Tharpe. You might say Fm concerned, too. I don’t hear anything on the street. You?”

  He shook his head first, some top skin flashing in the hospital light. “I thought Dotes was sulking on account of we used his place.”

  “I thought so, too. At first. Only that wouldn’t be his style, would it?”

  “Nah. Feisty as he is, he’d have busted our heads and kicked our asses out of there if he was really pissed.”

  “He’d have tried, anyway.”

  Crask smiled. He did that so seldom it was startling. “Yeah. Tried. I got some business I got to get on with, Garrett. I’m late, I been chasing all over after you to find out about Sadler. I want you should walk along, talk to me. Maybe we can brainstorm out where people are disappearing.”

  I didn’t feel like it but didn’t argue. It wasn’t that I was afraid of offending him. I thought I might learn something. Call it intuition.

  The first thing I learned was that Crask wasn’t, for the moment at least, the man I knew and loathed. He was so busy working on something inside him that some of his barriers against the world leaked. He seemed almost human at moments—though not so much I’d want my sister to marry him if I had a sister. I don’t and I’m glad. My friends are hostages enough for fortune.

  30

  For some hours I’d entertained the notion that Chodo had eliminated Morley and Saucerhead in order to deprive me of resources should I discover he’d become interested in the Book of Dreams. Sometimes you get that way, thinking you’re the center of the universe. But once I ran into Crask, the speculation collapsed under the weight of reason.

  You grab straws when nothing makes sense.

  Morley had dropped out before Chodo could have discovered the book’s nature. Even now I had no real reason to suspect he knew about the book. Him looking for a missing Sadler only made everything murkier.

  Who might be making people disappear? The Serpent shouldn’t be interested in those guys. She was after the Book of Dreams. Headhunting wouldn’t help. The same reasoning applied to happy old Fido Easterman.

  So who had reason to eliminate my acquaintances?

  Plenty of people, if you took them individually. But nobody was the only answer when you considered them as a group. They didn’t share many enemies.

  Crask agreed.

  We trudged along, me leaning into the bitter wind and grumbling about not having a clue. Then about having so many clues I didn’t know which had to do with what.

  “Where we headed?” I asked. This wasn’t helping me any yet. I glanced back I still felt the presence of that shadow that had been with me off and on. I didn’t see anything. Like I’d maybe expected I would?

  “Tenderloin,” Crask mumbled. The wind was getting to him, too. He was trying to shelter his injured arm. “Got an appointment with some dwarves.”

  Ah. So, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  The Tenderloin is sin’s homeland in TunFaire. Anything goes, nobody asks questions, nobody interferes with anybody else. Missionaries not welcome. Reformers enter at your own risk. Likewise everybody else. The Serpent’s whole gang could hide there in plain sight easy, despite everyone and everything being owned by Chodo. They’d just need to remember not to run in a pack.

  I really should have thought of it. The Tenderloin isn’t far from Dwarf Fort. It’s just a few blocks past the Bledsoe and I’d been told the renegade dwarves had fled that way after one of their skirmishes with Gnorst’s bunch. Had I been from out of town and needed to hide, that’s where I’d have gone to ground.

  So why hadn’t I thought to come poke around? I must be getting senile.

  The Tenderloin never sleeps, it just slows down late. When we arrived, lamplighters were out snuffing lights, conserving oil. During peak hours the area is awash with light, a carnival, but the management doesn’t waste a copper that won’t return ten. This was the hour of the diehard, when light and darkness were irrelevant.

  The Tenderloin is like the whores who are its chief commodity, all paint and makeup on the outside. Behind the flash lies rot and stink and human despair. Even where they could, they don’t put makeup on that. By the time you look it in the eye, they’ve already gotten your money and are interested only in processing you through as fast as can be managed.

  The wind grew more bitter by the minute. Maybe that was why the morCartha had taken the night off. Their native valleys are much warmer. The lamplighters hunched inside their ragged coats and cursed into their beards. The barkers for various establishments watched the street through doors cracked scant inches, waited till we drew abreast to jump out and wax rhapsodic about wonders unimaginable available within. They retreated when we signaled Jack of interest. Nobody pressed. They all recognized Crask.

  I let him show the way, wandered off inside me in search of one good reason why I kept charging around looking for the Book of Dreams. I’d begun to distrust me. I feared there was a part of me that wanted it the way the Serpent and Easterman wanted it. The way maybe even the local prince of dwarves wanted it.

  There was a new idea. It deserved a look. It might explain why Gnorst was uncommunicative. He might be thinking of trying on Nooney Krombach’s shoes.

  “Uh-oh “ While I was scouting the badlands within, the outer landscape had changed. The streets had emptied. Crask had stopped hurrying. Now he tread softly, clung to shadows.

  Something was about to go down.

  Crask had a few steps on me. I zagged to the side, up stairs that climbed the face of an old tenement He didn’t notice His attention was focused ahead. I flattened out on the landing in front of a second-story doorway.

  I trust my hunches, usually I’d had a sudden, strong one that this was no time for Garrett to be out in the open and a worse one to dive into shadowed alleys. I thought shadow and tried to become one with the chilly darkness, nothing but watching eyes.

  My hunch was good. I’d barely flattened myself out when every alley in sight barfed hard boys. Crask made hand signals. They all headed for the place that was the target of Crask’s good hand.

  About then he noticed I wasn’t with him anymore. He looked around, startled, spat, cursed, and I knew I’d come one step short of stepping into a big pile of it, maybe.

  Had he been leading me to the slaughter?

  Joining his party sure didn’t look like a brilliant move. I stayed where I was and froze my tail and wondered.

  What was wrong with the Serpent? I’d been told and told that somebody who could make a book of shadows was a real heavyweight in the sorcery game. But she didn’t act like a heavyweight. Her so
rt, when they have any weight at all, aren’t bashful about throwing it around. But she did her pushing and shoving with second-string hired hands. It was confusing.

  The state TunFaire was in, with all our witches and wizards and whatnot off to chase Glory Mooncalled, somebody like the Serpent ought to be able to do whatever she damned well pleased. But she was going about her search like she had no more power than crazy Fido.

  Had she put it all into her book, then let that get away?

  Sounded good. Sounded like she would be one desperate witch, cranky as a dragon with bad teeth.

  Chodo’s hordes swept silently toward a tenement. The silence didn’t last. A big uproar broke out as soon as a couple got inside. There were enough illegal weapons in evidence to arm a company. The uproar inside reached battle pitch. People were getting hurt in there.

  It didn’t last. The kingpin’s men started dragging captives outside, began forcing them to undress.

  Uh-oh. The Dead Man’s prophecy had come true.

  I couldn’t hear the orders and threats Crask issued but didn’t need to. He had to be looking for tattoos.

  I didn’t see the Serpent among the prisoners. Neither did Crask. He stomped around and cussed theatrically. I rested my chin on my forearms, shivered, and wondered how he’d known about the tattoos. Had I mentioned them? I couldn’t recall. I guess I must have when I was trying to direct Chodo’s attention toward the Serpent.

  Crask didn’t accept defeat. He had his troops drag out the dead and wounded, lined everybody up, started his inspection all over again. The prisoners shivered and whimpered. The wind was merciless.

  He found her. She’d assumed the form of a ratman. Short fur hid her tattoo. The second he made her he popped her upside the head, got a gag stuffed in her mouth and about forty-three miles of rope wrapped around her. She looked like a mummy. He wasn’t going to take no chances with a witch.

  He barked orders, The wind stole them away I didn’t need to hear them. The hard boys started marching prisoners toward the river. I had a suspicion their life expectancies weren’t those of immortals.