Angry Lead Skies Read online

  I didn’t believe that but it sounded like the sort of behavior and motivation that would make sense to a John Stretch.

  John Stretch was a record-setter of a ratman. He had berries the size of coconuts — but limited smarts to go with them. Though a lack of brains never has been a huge handicap in TunFaire’s underworld. Guts and daring get you ahead faster.

  “I want them both. But the false Bic more than the other.”

  The ratman twitched, mad as hell. But he maintained his self-control. “I will inform John Stretch. What should I tell him about the woman Winger?”

  “I don’t know. She’s his problem. You could let him know she’s involved with The Call. And that one of her lovers is Deal Relway. Of the Guard. He might find that information useful when he decides how to dispose of her.”

  The Call is a virulently racist veterans’ organization, armed and organized as a private, political army. It shares a good many goals with Deal Relway. I wouldn’t want to be a ratman who came to The Call’s attention because I’d done harm to a human woman.

  And Deal Relway is Deal Relway, increasingly the bogeyman to all those who practice wickedness in TunFaire.

  I stopped to visit with some of the pixies. From brief encounters I knew two of the youngsters by sight, a daring boy who called himself Shakespear and a young lady named Melondie Kadare, who was so sweet and pretty I wished I could whack her with a transmogrification stick and grow her up to my size.

  Melondie was the pixie who had followed me into the alley out back on the occasion of my first encounter with a silver elf in a Bic Gonlit disguise. Back then she’d been a precocious, curious adolescent. Now she was a serious, refined young woman. More or less. When the old folks were looking.

  Pixie lives race away far faster than our own. I think that may be why we’re uncomfortable around the little people. They’re so much like us, in miniature. Their swiftly lived lives remind us, piquantly, that our own more numerous hours are still painfully and perfectly numbered.

  62

  Singe let me into the house moments after the Goddamn Parrot, evidently under the illusion that he was some kind of eagle, slammed down onto my right shoulder and tried to carry me off to his aerie.

  He couldn’t work up quite enough lift. So he gave up.

  I feared Singe was going to climb all over me exactly the way I’d wished about a thousand young women of passing acquaintance would’ve done in days of yore. And she might’ve done so if the sexier silver elf hadn’t come out of the Dead Man’s room to see what was happening. She wore a tattered old shirt probably taken from Dean’s ragbag. It might’ve served as a child’s nightshirt before it acquired all those holes. It was barely sufficient to cover the subject. Most of the time.

  That was distracting. Even on her. Because there was nothing but her underneath the tatters.

  Maybe it was some sort of experiment by His Nibs.

  Singe settled for clinging to my arm. “So what great adventures did you get to enjoy out there today, while the rest of us were locked up here, dying of boredom?”

  I detached the Goddamn Parrot from my shoulder. “I traded you to John Stretch for two Bic Gonlits and a sugar-cured ham.” I tossed the jungle chicken in the general direction of his perch, in the small front room.

  “What?” Singe shrieked.

  “John Stretch really wants you. You really turned his head.”

  Garrett, do not be a fool. Miss Pular is about to fly into a panic. What you are saying means more to her than it should.

  “I’m sorry, Singe. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that like it sounded. I was teasing you. Yes, I did tell John Stretch that I’d trade you for two Bics. But his chances of...”

  Garrett!

  “All right! Singe, no matter what I told John Stretch, I’m not letting you go. Nobody is going to take you away. So relax. Take some time, again, to see if you can’t figure out when you’re being teased. And I’ll try to rein it in. If I can. Humans seldom speak straightforwardly and direct. I find that frustrating myself, sometimes.” Like almost every time I spend more than a few minutes in the company of most human women. “Anyway, even if I was that big a villain, how likely is it that John Stretch would keep his word?”

  “Because he’s nothing but a slimy little rat, you mean, and we all know that ratpeople are nothing but stupid, lazy, lying, thieving, smelly animals?”

  While Singe shouted the Dead Man passed along one or two points of interest. Well, well. The ratman who calls himself John Stretch was born Pound Humility, of the same female one litter before Miss Pular Singe. It may be that his interest in her is less political than personal. Miss Pular suspects an unwanted brother’s concern for his sister’s welfare. From the viewpoint of a ratman she would be making a huge mistake by getting involved with you.

  “Whoa! Whoa! Singe! I’m sorry! I apologize! That isn’t what I meant at all.” I felt a variant of Winger’s question kicking in. If the woman who heard it wasn’t human was the man still wrong? Apparently so. I’d tripped a triggerwire and I wasn’t going to talk my way out of this one.

  Good to see that you are not going to deny that she is involved with you, even if you do not feel that you are involved with her.

  The Dead Man rescued me. This once. Because this wasn’t a hole I’d dug for myself without help and because Singe was creeping up on the edge of true hysteria. And if there’s anything the Dead Man dislikes more than females in general, or as a class, it’s hysterical females.

  There was one plus side to the whole emotional circus. Although ratgirls do get upset, they don’t shed tears.

  The silver elf woman just kept standing there, gaunt as Famine Himself in that old shirt, taking the scene in with those huge, strange eyes. She didn’t seem frightened anymore. I wondered how much she was picking up from the Dead Man.

  63

  Dean brought food and drink to the Dead Man’s room. He seemed to have adjusted to the extended presence of guests. He and Singe, in particular, seemed to have achieved a sound accommodation.

  After relating my extensive adventures I asked the Dead Man, “Have you been able to learn anything from our elven guests?”

  A great deal. Beginning with the obvious fact that they are not actually elves, nor are they members of any similar or familiar species. Nor are they a mixture of familiar species. Nothing that I have learned, by the way, was provided to me voluntarily. They suspect, but do not yet know, that they have revealed a great deal about themselves and their kind. This one knows herself as Evas, which is the diminutive for something even I cannot fathom. The other is Fasfir and was the captain of their party of three. They have much more complex interior lives than human beings, yet seem to envy your emotional freedoms. Fasfir, curiously, seems to have a rudimentary sense of humor.

  “All right. Your talents are mighty and your cleverness surpasses anything the world has ever seen. What do we know now that we didn’t know yesterday?”

  We now know that Casey is what he claims to be, an officer of their law sent here a year ago to arrest Lastyr and Noodiss. Insofar as I can decipher the images in Evas’ mind, which is much easier to penetrate than is Fasfir’s, those two are religious missionaries originally sent out by an outlaw cult known as the Brotherhood of Light. Proselytization is a major crime under the laws of these people. Casey is supposed to arrest them, simply for their intent to proselytize.

  They stole the skyship they used to come here. They were not skilled in its operation. They crashed it into the river. Their motives for teaching Kip to invent things have to do with wanting him to create things that have to exist before they can begin to make the tools that they will need to fix their ship.

  Which takes them into another entire realm of crime entirely, apparently. That of revealing the secrets of state sorcery. Another department sent out Evas and her companions to seize Lastyr and Noodiss for betraying sorcerous secrets, the fact of those crimes having been included in Casey’s reports, which somehow leaked over to
the competing bureau.

  “If they needed a ship why didn’t they just go down to the waterfront and hire one?”

  Evidently the journey is too long to make in a normal sailing ship, which supposedly cannot travel fast enough to make it to their country in even a Loghyr’s lifetime.

  “Wow.” What else could I say? I’ve always known that the world is bigger than what I’ve experienced in my thirty years, but distances on that scale are beyond my comprehension. “And what about the elves from the flying disk? Who are they? Still more cops?”

  They appear to be something resembling a sorcerer who, though he spends his whole lifetime studying magic and discovering new things about it, never does anything more practical with his discoveries than just write the information down. They are members of a fraternity where the search for knowledge is an end in itself. The excitement about Lastyr and Noodiss alerted them to the existence of Karenta and TunFaire, so they assembled an expedition to come study us. Apparently they wanted to grab Kip Prose because their ship is suffering its own problems and they thought that if they could open communications with Lastyr and Noodiss, working together they could produce one working vessel from the two cripples.

  I do stumble into the weird stuff. And you can’t get much weirder than this.

  These last four may also have been doing commercial surveys of some sort, as a condition of gaining financial support for their research. At least one of them may be a ringer who really works for a law enforcement bureau that somehow oversees commerce. Fasfir holds all four in complete contempt. At the same time she is convinced that they are her crew’s only chance of ever getting home. If their aerial ship can be made capable of completing one more long voyage, Fasfir sees two ways of accomplishing that. One calls for an improbable amount of good luck making repairs to the one aerial ship you saw up close in the wine country. The other requires that she and her friends find Lastyr and Noodiss so that their wrecked flying ship can be cannibalized to make repairs to the other. Fasfir is much more knowledgeable than is Evas, who seems to be the junior member of the mission.

  The creature Casey will have a ship of his own hidden somewhere, of course. There is a general consensus that he will rescue no one but himself. He feels no responsibility for the others. But he will take Lastyr and Noodiss back as prisoners. And Fasfir is afraid that those two might be ready to surrender. They came here to save Karentine souls and teach Karentines forbidden magics that would make their lives easier but after a year of exposure to our savage ways, she fears, even those two have to have become convinced that we deserve our damnation.

  “Not exactly original thinking there.” A quick visit to the Chancery steps will expose you to all the outrage against the moral destitution of our times that you can possibly stand. Most of us are so poverty-stricken morally that we don’t realize that we’re missing something. According to the rant-and-ravers.

  It was unoriginal when I was a stripling. It is a long slide indeed that never reaches bottom.

  “You ever find any way to communicate with them directly?”

  I have not yet given the matter much consideration. However, and despite any pretense to the contrary, this one understands spoken Karentine perfectly. They have a sorcery which allows them to learn very quickly.

  Meaning she was tracking my part of the conversation.

  Exactly.

  “Ouch. But is there any solid reason for us to hide?”

  Evas stood motionless, regarding me with those huge, unblinking eyes, possibly trying to see inside me, to the place where I was listening to the Dead Man. I wondered if she was having any success. I conjured a vivid erotic vision of the two of us rather energetically being boys and girls together. The Dead Man made his disgust known immediately. The silver elf did not, though by happenstance there was a huge crash in the kitchen.

  I did get a somewhat puzzled look from Singe, which confirmed my suspicion that she might be slightly sensitive herself.

  Very slightly. For which be grateful. Had she viewed that image we might be dealing with hysteria all over again.

  “You know, I still ache all over anytime I sit still for very long. I don’t want to be a detective anymore today. And when I get up tomorrow I just want to be an accountant trying to figure out how to make sure we get paid for all of this. Can they read and write?”

  I do not know. And now I can no longer see inside Evas’ head without hammering my way in. For some reason she has begun to suspect that someone here might be able to read her mind. You would not have any notion why she might suspect that, would you?

  I shrugged. It didn’t seem likely, did it?

  I’m not usually much concerned about money — as long as I’ve got some. I was growing concerned because of this mess, though. We were spending and spending and spending to hire help and buy food and there seemed to be an ever smaller likelihood of us managing any return on investment. Kip was back home with his family. The silver elves seemed to have lost interest in him. After the country confrontation, they all knew that he couldn’t finger Lastyr and Noodiss.

  But Old Bones was having him one hell of a good time, I could tell. This thing was the most fun he’d had in years. It was something new. These two weird women, Evas and Fasfir, were, to him, as exciting and alluring as was my friend Katie to me.

  I said, “This’s the least violent, least traditional thing we’ve ever been into. I’m not comfortable with it at all. The stakes are trivial and these silver elves are too alien for me to find very interesting.”

  Perhaps you will feel differently in the morning. Try considering the stakes from a viewpoint not your own. I will be doing that myself now that I have the mind time free. One obvious avenue of exploration is the possible dangers the Lords of the Hill fear.

  “Those old paranoids are only scared because they think the whole world is infested with people as cruel and wicked and mean-spirited as they are.”

  True. But that does not render them automatically wrong in every instance. They can be afraid in a huge way because it is possible for them to have huge enemies to make life terrible, not just for them but for us all. Just one of these silver elves needs to be wicked and willing to use their weird but powerful sorcery against us.

  He was right about that. Those people controlled some very strange powers.

  He was right about me feeling differently in the morning, too — for reasons entirely unrelated to any remotely within his consideration at the time.

  64

  I wakened suddenly, thinking those pixies had to go. But they were quiet. Instead, there was a weak light burning and I wasn’t alone in my bed. When I turned to tell Singe, yet again, that this couldn’t happen, a spidery gray finger fell upon my lips. Another spidery finger touched a large eye, then tapped my temple.

  Oh, boy. What was this? The silver elf woman, Evas, knelt on the edge of my bed. She’d seen that naughty image after all. And she’d brought a sheaf of papers with her. I recognized them. They’d all been in my office, on my desk, before I’d come upstairs.

  Evas could read and write Karentine. And she’d been a busy little scribbler.

  She placed the papers in my hands. The top sheet said, simply, Teach me.

  She removed that raggedy, short shirt. And again placed a finger on my lips when I started to tell her to go away.

  That petite form definitely did have its appeal, suddenly. I couldn’t resist wondering about its possibilities.

  Later I would wonder if there was any chance my thoughts had been guided from outside.

  Evas moved the top sheet of paper to the bottom of the stack.

  Followed a story of an extremely ancient people who, ages ago, had decided to set aside the insidious and constant distortions of the intellect that are caused by the stormy demands of sexual reproduction.

  I could relate to that. Some would claim that I’m intellectually distorted most of the time. I confess freely that I’d be much more respectable and much less emotionally vagrant if
the gods hadn’t seen fit to bless and curse the rest of us with women.

  Evas declared herself a despicable throwback who suffered wicked urges and curiosities all the time. She’d fought those successfully until now only because she’d always been surrounded by people who wouldn’t let her get into situations where she might embarrass herself.

  Here, tonight, she had an opportunity to pursue the curiosities that were driving her mad. And her people would never be the wiser.

  Chances were excellent that such an opportunity would never come to her again.

  She knew the mechanics. She’d taken advantage of her ability to move around unseen to indulge her curiosity intellectually. They all had. She was the only one who hadn’t been repelled.

  Back to sheet one and Teach me.

  Hers was a whole new, entirely intellectual approach to the art of seduction. Backed up by what my rude senses could gather of her mental state. Evas wasn’t kidding. And in that weak light she looked far more exotic and desirable than weird.

  I had fallen into every red-blooded boy’s favorite daydream.

  At some point Evas took time out to use a thin fingertip to trace letters on my skin to pass me the message, “I will not break.” She wanted me to know that she wasn’t nearly as fragile as she looked.

  65

  “Good morning, Sunshine,” Dean told me, nudging me to let me know he’d brought my tea. I was half-asleep at the breakfast table, unable to stop grinning.

  I grunted.

  “Odd. You’re smiling. And you got to bed at a reasonable hour for once. But you’re as crabby as a mountain boozelt.”

  “Them damned pixies. They never shut up. All night long.”

  He didn’t challenge me. That could only mean that he didn’t know any better.

  Singe appeared, obviously having been up since the crack of dawn. She was chipper, though possibly more conspiratorial than ever. She was pleasant to me. Nor was I getting any grief from the Dead Man.