Wicked Bronze Ambition

  Singe would have been grinning were she made that way. Her body language practically screamed that she was in a great good mood. She went out of her way to be nice to Dollar Dan.

  Dan had decided to back off and bank the fire. He would become part of the environment, which was his job assignment anyway.

  Singe was amused. She was bright enough to recognize the new strategy.

  I think she was secretly flattered.

  I began to suspect that there was a marginal chance that Dan could wear her down.

  On the other hand, I doubted that he had enough time. He was mortal.

  70

  Tara Chayne said, “Let’s take these beasts back to their stable. It’s practically on the way.”

  “Suppose your sister isn’t in good enough shape to walk?”

  “We can only hope. We’ll drag her. You grab one foot, I’ll grab the other, and we’ll both hope she’s wearing a skirt.” She faked a dreamy look. “And no bloomers.”

  How much of that poison was real?

  The Machtkess girls certainly had an eccentric love-hate thing going.

  Singe fell in beside me. “I just had to get out of the house.”

  “Huh?”

  “It is getting stressful. I am not equipped to mother a human teenager, nor do I have the force of personality to manage an old man who refuses to act his age.”

  “Problems with Penny?” I faked an anxious look around. “Actually, she’s pretty well grounded. Just don’t let her know I think that.”

  “She is. Near as I can tell, being younger than her in actual years.”

  There was that. Singe was a full adult rat person, but in universal time she was two years younger than Penny.

  Her people grow up faster, living shorter, harder lives. Ninety percent have been dead awhile by the time they reach my age.

  “Hey. How has it been with Vicious Min? I never even thought to check on her.”

  “Dean handles her with help from Humility’s women. I have other things to do.”

  Her distaste was plain.

  I shrugged. “Whatever works.”

  “Penny helps a lot, too.”

  “Good for her. She’s finally making herself useful.” I was jabbering on semiautomatic. Something didn’t seem right. Brownie and the girls weren’t happy anymore, either. “Has His Nibs gotten anything out of her?”

  “What he has gotten is frustration. He says something inside her keeps adjusting as he finds ways in, as soon as he begins to probe.”

  We stopped briefly while an old-style Sisters of the Biting Oracle party, playing brass instruments, crossed an intersection in front of us. That took a while, not that they were deliberately holding up traffic. They were old. The youngest was Tara Chayne’s mother’s age—and she was strutting out in front of her grandparents.

  Sons and grandsons helped carry the instruments.

  Tara Chayne said, “I enjoyed their music more when I was Penny’s age.”

  “The nuns probably enjoyed it more when you were Penny’s age, too. And that was wicked of you.”

  She had attached the leather tracer from under my saddle blanket to an instrument case being lugged by the last grandson in line.

  She might have been my kind of girl when she was Penny’s age, too. Unfortunately, back then I hadn’t been old enough to be born yet.

  Singe and the dogs were sniffing the air now, and Dollar Dan’s head bobbed like a pigeon’s as he looked for something. Only Tara Chayne seemed at ease.

  Then I spotted the gargoyles.

  They were watching from atop a white limestone building up ahead. There were eight of them. Their heads bobbed the way Dollar Dan’s head was.

  I told Moonblight, “That looks like more your expertise than mine.”

  “What does?” Then she spotted the critters staring at us in apparent confusion. “I see.” She laughed.

  “What?”

  Neither Singe nor Dollar Dan got the joke, either.

  “You thought they were demons, didn’t you? Real gargoyles, maybe? But they’re regular animals. We just don’t see them inside the wall anymore.”

  Closer and looking from a steeper angle, I could see that she was right. Those were flying thunder lizards and yes, of a sort not seen inside the city lately. Other people were beginning to point and wonder, too.

  The gargoyles seemed unhappy about being on the city stage.

  We kept moving. They kept fidgeting, watching us in a way that left me sure that we were the reason that they had come to town.

  Moonblight told me, “You are one lucky son of a bitch, Garrett.”

  “It ain’t luck, it’s mad skills. What did I get right this time?”

  “You lucked out. You caught that boy marking your horse. If you hadn’t spotted him and I hadn’t slapped that tag onto that baboon’s bassoon—”

  “It was a two-reed flute.”

  “—those monsters would be all over us now.”

  I was getting my mojo back. Instead of screeching, tearing my hair, and refusing to believe her, I observed, “That would constitute a whole new angle on the art of murder.”

  “Well . . . Not really. But this might be the first time in your lifetime that anyone collected flying lizards and imprinted them with a target.”

  For no rational reason I thought aloud, “The Black Orchid.”

  “Not hardly.” Amused. “Orchidia is a hands-on girl. If she wants you dead you’ll be smelling the cognac on her breath when your lights go out. This was set up by somebody who wanted to be far away when the excitement started.”

  “Me for sure?”

  “Yours was the horse that got marked. Though I will stipulate that the kid might not have known it was your horse. And the baddies probably want anybody with you to go down, too. To ease the pressure later.”

  I grunted. The boy probably figured that the smaller horse had to belong to the woman.

  We were just yards from being directly in front of the limestone ugliness. The thunder lizards were three stories up, making noise enough to be heard a block away. Had they had any brains, you might have thought they were arguing about what to do.

  A singleton squawked and flapped clumsily off toward the musical nuns.

  You could still hear them playing, faintly.

  71

  Moonblight revealed her talents once more, showing no originality at all. Her best trick seemed to be that giant flying centipede of darkness.

  Singe asked, “Is there an alpha with those things?”

  I did not understand, nor did Moonblight.

  Dollar Dan, that clever fellow, did. “Most flying thunder lizards do not show gang behavior. Flock behavior? Those up there feature a red-and-blue crested helmet growth. I believe that makes them a carrion-eating breed.”

  I was lost. But he was right about what looked like big tumors on top of their heads. They were buzzards that would kill something when nature’s rhythm let them down.

  I was big on thunder lizards as a kid. You saw more of them back then. I thought I knew all about them. Now I knew that I didn’t.

  Singe explained, “I believe they hunt singly but call each other when they find a carcass, cooperating to fend off competitors. My question is, in a group situation does one animal take the lead? If so, we should capture that one and have Dan take it to the Dead Man.”

  “Good thinking, Singe!” Truly excellent. Scary excellent. Though Dollar Dan wasn’t excited about the role she had chosen for him. He didn’t argue with the logic, though.

  While we convened our committee, the gargoyles got on with business, the main feature of which was a massed plunge straight down.

  Moonblight’s centipede bought us precious seconds by wrecking the foremost monster and rattling the others.

  I produced the lead-weighted oaken head knocker I supposedly always carry, and actually had remembered this time. It was my favorite instrument of applied mayhem. This time it didn’t give me the reach I wanted. Those things had
wingspans of five to eight feet, the widest I’d ever seen inside the wall. Plus, they had plenty of claws and thickets of teeth that stuck out at seven different angles. I thought Dollar Dan might have been optimistic about them being carrion eaters.

  Dan produced a truncheon similar to mine. He would be in serious trouble if the tin whistles caught him carrying that. Not that he was breaking any formal law.

  The common law, the unwritten law, the law that says humans get to make it up as they go along where the Other Races are concerned—especially with artificials like rat people—was being badly abused here. Nobody wanted to see a rat man armed with anything resembling an actual weapon.

  A rat man with a nightstick might get the idea that he could hit somebody back, or even whack somebody just for being an asshole.

  Singe, however, had that staff that would cause less comment, she being a girl, and it had some real reach. Plus, as instantly became obvious, she had snuck in some training in the art of fighting with big-ass sticks. She destroyed three of those ugly turkeys in about that many seconds, stepping, grunting, twisting, thrusting, and thumping like she was working her way through a floor exercise.

  The rest of us would have backed off to watch, mouths agape for flies to nest in, if those gargoyles not yet demolished hadn’t decided to get the hell gone.

  A particularly bold monster, the one who had gone to scout the nuns, stayed to watch from the flock’s original perch.

  A tin whistle whose uniform had shrunk in the wash arrived. There were no longer any weapons in evidence. Dan and I were cleaning cuts and whining. Singe was leaning on her staff looking dreamy. Moonblight was poking fallen gargoyles and rifling pockets in the weird net vests they wore strung between their long necks and the hips of their stubby legs. The fat red top was too winded and stressed to grab witnesses who might not tell him the same lies we would. He puffed, hands on knees, staring in disbelief at the scattered beasts. A widening circle of emptiness developed as potential witnesses made themselves scarce.

  Folks just didn’t want to spend their afternoon telling red tops something the tin whistles didn’t want to hear.

  Moonblight drew the fat man’s attention by bringing in her centipede. That made clear what she was. “None of these creatures is dead, Officer, but they’re all broken. There’s another one up there.”

  I thought she meant the watcher but then noticed bits of ragged brown felt hanging off the edge of the roof. Her centipede had gotten one more as the gargoyles made their getaway.

  She added, “I can have it brought down if you like.”

  “No, ma’am. That is entirely unnecessary.” She being what she was, he was eager to please and to avoid inconvenience. He didn’t give a rat’s patootie about the rest of us. We must be servants. She was between us and him, anyway. “Other Guards will arrive soon, I’m sure. They will clean up and see what the witnesses say. How may we get in touch if it becomes necessary that my superiors disturb you?”

  I had trouble keeping a straight face. I almost lost it when Moonblight gave him her sister’s name. I got an ugly look for that.

  The moment the fat red top turned to greet the next tin whistle, Dollar Dan asked, “Does this mean that it is too late to take one—”

  Moonblight silenced him. “We didn’t get the right one.”

  We looked up.

  The remaining gargoyle wilted slightly, then concluded that it might have a brighter future elsewhere. A demonic centipede might be sent to visit if it stayed here. It launched itself in a frenzy of flapping.

  “Did you see?” Singe asked. She was staring up at the building beside the limestone ugly, a redbrick pile almost as hideous. It stood some taller with its sloping roof and whatever was above that.

  “I did not. What? I was engrossed in the gargoyle’s getaway. I was hoping it would smack into that half-timbered place over there. What did you see?” I figured she’d seen some other exotic from outside the wall, meaning maybe we ought to get braced for another adventure.

  “There was a little girl up there. Just standing on the slate. Dressed too heavy for the season. A nice blue coat. She went away walking with nothing underneath her feet.”

  “I see.”

  Tara Chayne nodded thoughtfully. “Hmm.” But she kept looking in the direction the gargoyle had fled. “It might behoove us to fade away before someone with more status, nerve, and initiative, who doesn’t care who we are, turns up.”

  Yes. Some Guards wouldn’t be afraid to hold us up all day for having committed the sin of making them work.

  Tara Chayne gestured at Singe and Dollar Dan, got them moving, then me and my mare, then moved out herself, walking rearguard.

  We hadn’t gone fifty feet before I found myself swarmed by dogs.

  They had vanished while gargoyle weather loomed. They crowded in close now, not confident of the threat’s end.

  I suspected that they might have some dark collective memories of deadly hunger from the sky.

  We nearly made a clean getaway, but the dreaded somebody with the exaggerated sense of self-importance did turn up and start hollering for us to hold it right there. He had a big, shiny Specials badge on his beret.

  “Nonsense,” Moonblight said. “Turn into that alley.”

  Dollar Dan did so. Singe followed. Garrett and pack, with pony, chugged along behind, neither arguing nor questioning. Surprised, Singe asked, “Are you feeling all right?”

  “No need to be a wiseass,” I snapped, and kept moving, thinking I knew what Moonblight intended. And she did it, putting up a visual barrier that would make it look like we had dashed into that alley and off the face of the earth.

  She was in a generous mood. She left no booby traps, humorous, humiliating, or dangerous. She caught up. “A shift in plans. I want to see Barate before we go after my sister.”

  “That will cost time. They could move her.”

  “I understand that. I’m trusting your associate to live up to her reputation.”

  Singe preened.

  “We can. Home it is, then.”

  72

  We were near where Strafa died when I realized that I had called her mansion home. Well. Wasn’t that interesting?

  Barate wasn’t there. I hadn’t expected him to be, but it made sense to check and not have to backtrack. Now we had to hope that he was at his mother’s place. We didn’t have time to hunt him down. If he wasn’t at Shadowslinger’s, I’d agitate for forgetting him.

  We found Race and Dex in the kitchen. They lacked sufficient work. They were mildly pickled and had yet to think about starting their suppers. We warned them to look out for unfamiliar visitors. Tara Chayne told them to take our horses back to the stable where she had hired them.

  We grabbed some small loaves of hard bread and traveled on.

  Singe warned me, “The dogs are getting worn out.”

  “So are mine.”

  The joke didn’t work. Mine seldom do. My sense of humor doesn’t work for anybody but me. “They can drop out whenever they want. They can stay here, go back to the last place, or head for Macunado Street. Or they can even go back to the cemetery. Nobody is making them follow me.”

  Tara Chayne blew out a couple of gallons of air in otherwise unregistered derision.

  I tried to ask why, but she wasn’t inclined to be conversational. I had disappointed her. And we had reached Shadowslinger’s door.

  Singe and Dollar Dan had to stay with the dogs but weren’t resentful. They were all allowed inside the entry foyer. Tara Chayne and I went to see the sorceress. I was anxious to move on along. It looked like it could rain later. Singe can have problems tracking in the wet.

  Barate and Dr. Ted were in with Shadowslinger, who looked as awful as ever even in a coma. Both men seemed worn down but in good spirits. Barate volunteered, “She’s showing progress. She’s moving fingers and toes. She even opened her eyes once.”

  Ted said, “She wasn’t seeing anything, though. Her pupils responded to light, but she
didn’t track.”

  Tara Chayne said, “You’re wasting too much worry on her, Barate. She’s indestructible. She’ll be back making us all miserable long before we’re ready. Probably by the weekend.”

  “Harsh, but I hope you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. I’m always right. The only time I’m not right is when people don’t agree that I’m right. I’m still right then. I just lose an argument to a fool who isn’t. Garrett wants to tell you about our day.”

  Not really, but I did so anyway, in detail, same as I would have with the Dead Man.

  Barate announced, “I’m getting curious about that little girl. Tell me more about her.”

  “There isn’t anything more to tell. Ted. Can Constance hear us?”

  He shrugged. “I can’t get a response. But that might only mean that she can’t respond. Why?”

  “Just curious.” Then I did try to tell Barate something else about the little girl, but I didn’t really have anything.

  He mused, “That all sort of rings a bell somehow. I don’t know why. Windwalkers don’t go active that young. Strafa was precocious but she showed no promise till she hit menarche.” He grinned at Ted.

  Ted said, “Look at you, using fancy words like you know what they mean.”

  “He’s always had a knack for faking things.”

  We all turned, startled.

  Richt Hauser stood in the doorway, but he hadn’t spoken. Kyoga Stornes had, from behind him. Kyoga looked decidedly grim.

  Barate asked, “Did something happen?”

  Bonegrinder said, “We’ve been standing here listening.”

  Both men came in. The room was getting tight. It threatened to get tighter. Mashego stood in the hallway, ready to do servant stuff if needed.

  Then Tara Chayne said, “Those kids last night! Oh! Richt, I’m so sorry!”

  So there I was, totally lost. Bonegrinder wasn’t married. I hadn’t heard about any illegitimate kids.

  He was generous enough to explain. “The twins were my sister Margete’s grandchildren. We all doted on them.”