Angry Lead Skies (8 page)

Playmate took a few steps backward, found a bit of broken brick that hadn’t yet been scrounged by the street children. (They sell brick chips and chunks back to the brickyards, where they’re powdered and added to the clay of new bricks.) He started to wind up, but paused and said, “Garrett, have you bothered to look up?”

I hadn’t. Why would I?

None of the others had, either.

We all looked now.

That wall wasn’t part of anything. It might not even be stone. It just went up a ways, then turned fuzzy and wiggly and lizard’s belly white. Then it turned misty. Then it turned into nothing.

“It’s an illusion.”

Playmate chucked his brickbat.

The missile proceeded to proceed despite the presence of a wall that appeared completely solid, if improbably cold and damp when I extended a cautious finger to test it. Saucerhead Tharpe isn’t nearly as careful as Mama Garrett’s only surviving son. He reached out to thump that wall. And his fist went right on through.

We all stepped back. We exchanged troubled looks. I said, “That’s an illusion of the highest order.”

Singe said, “I hear someone calling from the other side.”

Playmate observed, “An illusion that persists, that can be used as camouflage, requires the efforts of a master wizard.”

I grunted. In this town that meant somebody off the Hill. It meant one of six dozen or so people who are the real masters in Karenta.

Singe said, “There is somebody over there. Yelling at you, Garrett.”

I asked Playmate, “What do you think?” I admit to being intimidated by Hill people. But I’ve never backed down just because they stuck a finger in somewhere. I wouldn’t back down now. Kip’s kidnapping had me irked and interested. Of everyone I asked, “Anybody want to walk away?”

Nobody volunteered to leave, though Saucerhead gulped a pail of air, Playmate seemed to go a little green and Singe started shaking like she was naked in a blizzard and didn’t have a clue which way to the warm. She made some kind of chalk sign on a real wall, maybe to ward off evil.

“You’re the Marine,” Playmate said. “Show us your stuff.”

Saucerhead pasted on a huge grin. He was ex-army, too. And he had heard my opinions concerning the relative merits of the services more often than had Playmate. He refused to see the light. It’s a debate that seems doomed to persist forever because army types are too dim to recognize the truth when it kicks them in the teeth.

Saucerhead’s whole face threatened to open up. I thought the top half of his head was going to tip over backward onto his shoulders. He gasped out, “Yeah, Garrett. Let’s see some of that old Marine Corps ‘Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle.’”

Ominously, Singe said, “There is no yelling anymore.”

“I’m thinking about giving
you
some of that good old, big boy.” I took a deep breath and squared off with the illusory wall.

Saucerhead chuckled. He knows I’d never come straight at him if I did think I had to get after him. Business led us to butt heads briefly once upon a time, long ago. The results had been far from satisfactory from my point of view.

I whooped like I was going in, back in my island warfare days, straight up the middle indeed. Something that we did not actually do very often, as I recall. Us and the Venageti both very much preferred sneaking around, stabbing in the back, to any straightforward and personally risky charging.

That wall was more than just an illusion. It resisted me. Hitting it felt a little like belly flopping, though with more stretch and give to the surface. Which popped after a moment. And which felt as cold as a god’s heart until it did.

My efforts evidently weakened the wall considerably because the big army types followed me through as though there wasn’t any resistance at all. And the civilian followed them. But I wasn’t really keeping track.

We’d overtaken our quarry where they’d holed up temporarily, either so they could interrogate Kip or so their injured buddies could recuperate. There was another imaginary wall beyond them. That one had a bricklike look even though it was semitransparent. From my point of view.

My heart jumped. Our approach had to have been noticed.

In that instant I sensed movement. The corner of the eye kind of movement you get when your imagination is running wild. Only what I wasn’t imagining was happening right in front of me and I couldn’t get a solid look at it. Then, for a moment, I saw silver elves and Kip with something clamped over his mouth and I realized that Singe’s sharp ears must’ve caught his cries for help back when she’d kept talking and nobody had bothered to listen.

A shimmering silver elf extended a hand toward me.

I dodged.

I didn’t move soon enough.

Once again I didn’t feel the darkness arrive.

13

Morley Dotes was right there in my face again when I woke up. “Some kind of party you must throw, Garrett. Blitzed into extinction again. And the sun still hasn’t gone down.” He looked around as I tried to sit up. My head pounded worse than before. “But in an alley? Even if it is a pretty clean one for this burg?”

“Gods! My head! I don’t know what they did to me but it’s enough to make me consider giving up liquor.”

“You give up your beer? Don’t try to kid a kidder, kid.”

“I said liquor, nimrod. Beer is a holy elixir. One shuns beer only at the risk of one’s immortal soul. I see you’re all freshly prettied up. How’d you find us?”

Two of Morley’s henchmen had accompanied him. I didn’t know them. They were clad in the outfits waiters at The Palms usually wear but they were much younger than Sarge and Puddle and Morley’s other traditional associates. Maybe the old guys were getting too old.

“Your girlfriend left us a trail to follow. Standard rat chalk symbols. You didn’t notice? A trained detective like you?”

Pride made me consider fibbing. “No. I didn’t. Not really.” Ten years ago I couldn’t have admitted any failing. Which, at times, had left me looking just a whole lot stupider than a simple confession would’ve done.

People are strange. And sometimes I think I might be the strangest people I know.

Morley’s boys didn’t lift a finger to help anybody. Dotes himself didn’t do anything but talk. Which told me he thought none of us had been hurt badly. “What happened to the illusion?”

“What illusion?”

I explained. Morley wanted to disbelieve but dared not in the face of Saucerhead’s confirmation. Tharpe doesn’t have the imagination to dress himself up with excuses as complex as this.

“So you scared them into running when they’re not really up to it. They have two casualties and a prisoner to manage.”

“We don’t know that any of them were hurt.”

“Yes, we do, Garrett. Use that brain the Dead Man thinks you have. If they don’t have someone injured they don’t have any reason not to just drag the kid straight off to wherever it is they want to take him. Let’s get back on the trail. They can’t have gone far.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe the villains were just around the corner. But I didn’t have any way to track them. Right now.

Singe was still out, stone cold.

“I wonder if they understand how we found them.” I was afraid the elves might’ve given Singe an extra dose of darkness because of her nose.

“Me, I’m wondering why they didn’t hurt you a lot more than they did,” Morley countered. His cure for most ills is to exterminate everybody involved. “For some reason they’ve slapped you down twice without doing any permanent harm.” He has difficulty comprehending that kind of thinking.

He emphasized “permanent” because my expression revealed the depth and breadth of the temporary harm I was suffering.

“You all right, Saucerhead?”

“Got a miserable headache.” Tharpe’s voice was gravelly. His temper would be extremely short. Best not to disturb him at all.

“How’bout you, Play?”

“What he said. And don’t yell. Makes it hurt even more.”

He didn’t need to yell back.

Maybe I was lucky. All the practice I’ve had dealing with hangovers. I turned to Singe. “Seems a shame to disturb her.” She did look rather peaceful.

“Kiss her and let’s get on with it,” Morley grumped. Without having been blessed by the elves.

“What?”

He opened his mouth to crack wise about the sleeping beauty, thought better of it, beckoned me. I followed him for as far as he felt was far enough to keep his remarks from being overhead by sharp rat ears. “She isn’t really out, Garrett. She’s giving you a chance to show some special concern.”

The fact that he didn’t make mock let me know that he was serious, that he was concerned about bruising Singe’s tender ego. Though the motives behind his concern were, probably, wholly selfish.

“Understood,” I told him, though that wasn’t entirely true.

I don’t like the responsibility that piles onto me when Singe gives way to these juvenile urges to manipulate me. That smacks of emotional blackmail. In fact, it
is
emotional blackmail. She just doesn’t understand that it is. And I’m not all that well equipped to deal with it. More than one lady of my acquaintance would suggest that I’m not far enough away from adolescence myself.

I went to the ratgirl, dropped to my knees beside her. “Singe?”

She didn’t respond. I thought her breathing was too rapid for someone who was supposed to be unconscious, though. How do you tell someone that their relationship fantasies can never become anything more than that? Everything I could possibly say to Singe would be true but would sound so stupidly cliché if said that I could do no good talking to her. She was important to me, personally and professionally. She had become one of the half dozen closest friends I had. I enjoyed teaching her how to cope in a world where she was less than welcome. But she could never be anything but a friend, a business associate, and a student. And I have no idea how to make her understand that without causing her pain.

When she first broke away from the dominance of her own people, where females have fewer rights than do horses amongst humans, I considered letting her move into my place. I thought of making her part of the team. I still think well of that idea. But the Dead Man did assure me that, in her desperation to be wanted and liked and loved, Pular Singe would give the offer far more weight than I intended.

I touched her throat. Her pulse was rapid. I glanced around. There was no immediate salvation apparent. Morley was grinning, exposing about a thousand bright white needle teeth in a silent taunt.

“You want I should carry her, Garrett?” Saucerhead asked. There went Tharpe, being thoughtful despite his pain. Like most human beings, he can be a mess of contradictions.

“That might be good. Any of you guys know anything about doctoring ratfolk? If we can’t fix her up ourselves we’ll have to take her back to Reliance.”

That ought to be the perfect medicine. The very philosopher’s stone.

Reliance is a sort of ratman godfather, a highly respected and greatly feared leader of that community who’s involved in a lot of questionable and some outright illegal activities. Reliance believes that Pular Singe belongs to him. There’s a chance he’s right within the rules of rat society. There is some sort of indenture involved. But rat society isn’t paramount in TunFaire. And that guy Garrett don’t much care about anybody’s customs or rules when he makes up his mind what’s right and what’s wrong.

“She wouldn’t be real happy about the boss rat getting his paws on her again, Garrett,” Tharpe assured me. With a wink, showing he’d gotten it. “He tried to hire me once to bring her back.” He grinned a grin filled with bad teeth.

Well. Maybe I was going to get some help with this after all, from the least likely source.

Saucerhead really can be a sensitive kind of guy.

And Singe, wonder of wonders, was stirring suddenly.

“So why didn’t you take the job?”

“Old Reliance, he’s too damned cheap for one thing. He just can’t get it through his head that it ain’t just a matter of rounding up one dumb female and dropping her off where he wants her delivered. He can’t get it through his skull that she can actually think for herself and that she can have made friends who’d be willing to look out for her. He just figures you’re trying to hold him up on your fee when you try to explain it to him.”

“You’d think he’d have figured it all out from direct experience. Whoops! Look here. It’s alive. Hi, sleepyhead. You’re the last one awake.”

Singe mumbled something.

“We’re just waiting on you.”

Singe smiled a weak rat smile. She probably thought she heard relief in my voice. Possibly she did. I was relieved that her problem wasn’t real.

Pular Singe’s recovery was dramatically swift once she decided that she needed to get healthy. Reliance’s name made a great whip.

Morley told one of his waiters to make a bread and cheese run while the rest of us sat around staking claims on being in worse shape than the other guy. Food was a great idea, I thought, but when the man came back with a basket filled with chow I didn’t feel much like eating.

A similar lack of appetite afflicted Saucerhead, Playmate, and Singe. And none of those three liked it even a little, either. They loved their food. Singe, in particular, always ate like a starved alley cat or one of her feral cousins. Everything in sight, steadily, gobbling so fast that the bugs never got a share.

I grumbled, “I think we’ve got us an invention right here. A new weight loss program for the lords and ladies.” Nobody else in this burg ever gets fat.

Soon enough, heads still aching and stomachs still empty, we proceeded as Singe picked up Kip’s trail. Though it had begun to get dark she had no trouble finding the way. Sight was never her master sense. Though it did become more important after nightfall. She could see in the dark better than Morley. And Morley has eyes like an owl.

This time the chase didn’t last twenty minutes.

This time the camouflage didn’t catch us unaware, either, though it existed as an addition to a building rather than as something thrown across a street. From the viewpoint of the silver elves the trouble was that the building they’d scabbed onto was one that Saucerhead and I knew. And had we not known it ourselves there were at least twenty local Tenderloin folk hanging around in the gloaming trying to figure out what was going on. That addition hadn’t been there half an hour earlier.