Faded Steel Heat

  Winger told me, “You need to consult some kind of expert, Garrett.”

  “Expert?”

  “About your habit of talking to birds.”

  “I could cure it in a minute. Faster, even. Take him home with you. He idolizes you. And he makes more sense than most people do.”

  Winger responded with a big raspberry. As they walked away Saucerhead tried to convince her that she’d just blown the best offer she’d had all year. Nobody human had shown as much interest.

  “You want a knuckle sandwich for supper you just keep on jacking your jaw,” Winger growled.

  “Where we gonna eat, anyway?”

  I shut the door, pleased that we’d gotten by without Winger trying to enlist me in some harebrained scheme for replacing the Crown Jewels with paste. They say you can’t pick your relatives but you can pick your friends. I must have some really strange secret urges.

  Garrett. Cease dallying.

  I entered the Dead Man’s room, calling to the kitchen, “Dean, I need you to come bear witness.” I knew the signs. I was about to be granted a nose-to-the grindstone lecture by the all-time grandmaster procrastinator and slough-off artist. Trouble was, the only witness who could really indict him would be another Loghyr. “A little chow wouldn’t hurt, either.” My own particular Loghyr, despite having been dead for ages, has the reputation of being one of the most ambitious of his kind ever.

  Some battles you can’t win. Wisdom is attained when you start to recognize those beforehand and slink onward in search of ground you do have a chance to hold.

  Dean, please bring our guest when you come. And do put together a platter for Garrett, if you will be so kind. He is hungry and becoming cranky.

  I was going to get crankier. His attitude earlier and that message told me our guest was female and under forty. Dean has a way with women young enough to be his daughters. They like to hang out in his kitchen. Partly that’s because he’s safe, partly because he indulges them like they were favorite daughters, partly because he’s a nice old guy.

  “Is Tinnie here again?”

  No. Tell me what happened out there.

  “The Goddamn Parrot was on top of me the whole damned time.”

  The beast is more limited than you believe. The bird is keen of ear but only in a narrow range. And his visual acuity and sense of smell leave much to be desired.

  “You ought to find yourself a human tool.” But not me.

  Perfect idea. Unfortunately, no human has a mind sensitive enough for remote access. No intelligent creature, whatever the species, fits my particulars exactly. There would appear to be a relationship. I must examine that someday.

  “Yeah,” I muttered, completely confident that I was a failed experiment.

  The door swung open. Dean, platter in hand, held it for someone.

  Someone stepped inside.

  “You?” I was surprised.

  “Me,” said Belinda Contague. “Your lack of enthusiasm is breaking my heart.”

  The woman doesn’t have one. But I didn’t remind her.

  She likes black. She positively loves black. She wore a black evening cloak over a masculine-cut black suit of very supple leather. She wore black boots with raised heels. A pair of long black-silk gloves were folded over her black-leather belt. When she arrived, I was sure, Dean had taken her black hat and veil and put them in the small front room. She’d painted her nails black and had put something on her lips to darken and gloss them. Then she’d used a face powder to make her skin appear more pallid.

  I have seen vampires with more color.

  Despite all that, or perhaps because of it, she was incredibly beautiful. More, she exuded something that made it difficult to cling to common sense and the urge to self-preservation. That bizarre look was very erotic.

  “You sent a message. I was in town. I had no other demands on my time. I came here. You were out but Dean was kind. As he ever is.”

  I glared at the Dead Man, thought hard: You should have warned me.

  He didn’t respond.

  Damn, the woman was bold. She knew what the Dead Man was. Nobody with a conscience as black as hers ought to be anywhere near him.

  Back in those remote times when the Outfit was in transition, passing into Belinda’s regency, we had a brief fling. I might consider myself lucky because I got out alive. Belinda is very strange. And when it comes to hardness she makes her daddy look like a pet bunny.

  I gobbled, “I’m sorry. You took me off guard. You’re the last person I expected.”

  Belinda Contague stands five feet six inches. She looks twenty-five, says she’s twenty. She lived a rough life before she took over. Lived like she was trying to kill herself. She was in good shape now, as her apparel proclaimed eloquently. Nature blessed her with a shape that would have them kicking the lids off their coffins if she strolled through a mortuary. Her dark eyes fell smack into the center of that semi-mythical “windows of the soul” class. You will discover more warmth and compassion in the stare of a cobra.

  I can’t imagine what she ever saw in me.

  I always knew she would come back to haunt me, though.

  “I’m not as bad as you think, Garrett.”

  Her daddy used to say the same thing. “Huh?”

  “My father turned out to be a good friend, didn’t he?” She sounded wistful.

  I grunted. My relationship with Chodo Contague had been strange, too. I did him a big favor once, accidentally, and forever afterward he felt he owed me. He did me good turns even when I didn’t ask. He covered my ass. He tried hard to entangle me in the Outfit’s webs so I’d become one of his soldiers. I repaid him by helping take him down.

  “Crask and Sadler are back in town.” That would take the play out of Belinda.

  “You saw them?” She actually became more pale.

  “No. I heard it from Relway. Via Captain Block. He traded the information for a favor.” She understood that kind of deal.

  She didn’t question my source. “What favor?”

  “It doesn’t involve you or yours.”

  “Relway isn’t interested in us?”

  “Of course he is. He’s interested in everything. But he’s a realist. He knows you offer services the public wants, nor are you breaking the law, mostly. Whatever the priests and reformers say. He’s really interested in people who hurt people. Or people he thinks threaten society. But he’s Relway. He’s a slave to his obsessions. He wants to know everything about everything.”

  Garrett, being able to read your mind and intentions helps but even so what you have just said makes only marginal sense.

  I had no trouble understanding me.

  Belinda got it, too, though her coal-chip gaze never stopped boring holes through me.

  I asked, “Darling, why couldn’t you be somebody else?” Nobody grabs the unreasoning side of me like Belinda Contague.

  “Sometimes I wish I was somebody else, too, Garrett. But it’s too late.”

  “Do we have to be enemies?”

  “Were we ever?”

  Yes. Careful, Garrett. “No. But what we are can drive us places where we’re out of choices.”

  “Sufficient to the day the evil thereof.”

  I gave her a look at my raised eyebrow. That always charms them.

  “And don’t try that on me, Garrett. You’re in my heart. Suppose we just go on the way you did with my father?”

  “Your dad thought he owed me.” The final account left me way in his debt, though.

  “I owe you. In a different way. You’re the only guy I know who treats me like a human being. Even when I was completely weird you treated me right.”

  “That’s just me.” I glanced at the Dead Man. He was one witness too many.

  “Shut up. I’m not proposing. I’m not going to steal you away from the Tate woman.” She has more spies than Relway. “But I do have my small claim on you.”

  Control your breathing, Garrett.

  When I was younger the old
guys promised me I’d grow out of the heavy breathing. Maybe you have to be dead, though. There’s always a Belinda or Tinnie or somebody scrambling my brain.

  “If what Relway wants doesn’t involve me, what’s the secret?”

  Good point. Perhaps. “He wants to infiltrate the rights movement. And I’m involved because some rightsist group is trying to extort money from the Weider family.”

  Belinda became the kingpin completely, a stone killer handicapped only marginally by her sex. “I have rightsist problems, too,” she said. “Those people have no respect. They believe they have the right to do whatever they want because their cause is just.”

  I grunted agreement. That was their thinking exactly.

  “I won’t let them tread on my toes.”

  Oh-oh. Somebody else wanted to sign me up.

  I am going to take a short nap, Garrett. I expect it will last all night.

  What? Now I knew why I hadn’t seen Belinda’s coach outside. She’d had no plans to leave and His Nibs suddenly was inclined to humor her. Which he had not been only a short while ago. What intriguing thought had he plucked from her spider’s nest of a mind?

  24

  I’m a devil pig, I’m told, because I like women. A lot. Go figure that kind of thinking.

  The preference has gotten me into trouble occasionally. With Belinda trouble could get ugly. The spiders in her head spin strangely kinked thoughts. And she had to turn up just when Tinnie’s stubbornness had begun to crack.

  I heard about it over breakfast, basking in Dean’s disapproval. I hated to let him waste all that bile.

  “Thanks,” I said, accepting the tea. “You’ll need to do up the guest bedroom after Belinda gets up.”

  The old boy had an idea in his head. He wasn’t going to let me confuse him.

  “You’re wasting an ulcer, Dean.” Help! I appealed to the Dead Man. Tell him nothing happened.

  I was asleep, Garrett. However, if a small prevarication will oil the machinery...

  Dean made a sound of disgust. He didn’t want to believe the Dead Man, either.

  Belinda came downstairs. She was in a bitter mood. She didn’t like not getting her own way. She glared at Dean. He responded with the indifference of a man so old he has nothing left to fear.

  Belinda shrugged. She cared for no man’s opinion, which wasn’t always wise. Her world was unforgiving and the penalties for failing to observe its rules often lethal. She worried too little about making enemies inside her own circle. She could have worked something out with Crask and Sadler.

  Belinda was Chodo Contague’s child, both his creation and his doom.

  It must have been hell to be his kid. Belinda wouldn’t talk about it but there was no doubt that she was bitter.

  There are suspicions that Belinda’s mother went to her eternal reward early because Chodo disapproved of her infidelity.

  That was common rumor before I ever met Belinda. It might have plenty to do with Chodo’s condition now.

  I feared Belinda’s obsessions might compel the Outfit to take her down. But she was quite capable of taking it down with her.

  Belinda asked, “Suppose I explain in person?”

  “That might get exciting.”

  “Is the woman irrational, Garrett?”

  “Is any woman reasonable after she makes up her mind? Tinnie’s not. I can’t figure her out. I hardly try anymore. What’re you trying to do to me?”

  “Nothing anymore, Garrett. It’s just business now.”

  Did I need to concern myself with the hell hath no fury syndrome?

  “Don’t worry, lover. These crackpots are bad for business. They’ll be dealt with. But —”

  “Hey! Could that be why Crask and Sadler are back? Because somebody wants their knowledge about you?”

  Belinda smiled like a cat contemplating a cornered mouse. “Possibly. I have an idea. Why don’t I be your companion tonight? I can see people I’d never run into otherwise.”

  “I’m dead.”

  She has put forth an outstanding idea, Garrett. Consider it.

  I had a good notion where she came up with it, too. “You consider it, Chuckles. You don’t have to get along with Tinnie Tate.”

  As Miss Contague has suggested, Miss Tate cannot be entirely irrational.

  “Then you know a different Miss Tate.” He did see more of Tinnie than I did, though. Maybe he knew something. Maybe the leopardess had changed her spots. Maybe she’d traded them in for saber-tooth tiger stripes.

  I told Belinda, “Me and the junior partner need to butt heads. He agrees with you.”

  “Tell him I take back all the wicked things I ever said about him.”

  “I won’t. I’m going to invent new words so I can say more.”

  25

  “What is this?” I demanded as I blew into the Dead Man’s room. “Are you determined to get me lynched?”

  I reiterate. Miss Tate is not irrational. Enough of that. There are larger issues at hand.

  “Larger to who, Old Bones?”

  Thousands. Even tens of thousands. Name for me, if you will, just five nonhumans murdered today who considered Miss Tate’s potential ill will an eventuality more dire than the catastrophe which actually afflicted them.

  “Unfair. Unfair.” He was deft at carving holes in the thickest smoke when the mood took him. “None of them knew Tinnie like I —”

  Garrett.

  “All right. How is taking Belinda along going to be useful?”

  We want to situate you so that you become a recognized intermediary between as many interests as possible. So you can dip into the information flows. This will position you to take advantage of anyone wishing to communicate with the Syndicate. Particularly as regards those with little sympathy for The Call and its ilk.

  Ilk? What kind of word is ilk? “Relway?”

  An excellent example. With Max Weider and his moderate friends, perhaps, as another spoke to that wheel. With effective guidance I can even see you situating yourself on the axis between the radical parties and Glory Mooncalled’s people.

  Guess who would do the guiding.

  He was feeling smug about his genius. His true plan drifted too near the surface of his thoughts. “Hang on there, Old Bones. There ain’t no way I can sell me to all those folks as the hero of their prophecies.”

  You do not have to sell yourself to Mr. Weider or Mr. Relway. You serve their interests already. No effort is needed to bring Miss Contague along, either. She wants to come aboard. That leaves only the rightsists and the rebels. The former are after you already.

  Aw, hell. Why not link up with the nonhumans and all those wannabe revolutionaries who have been lying low since the explosion of rightsist terrorism? The rightsists have no use for those guys, either. Rightsists don’t like anybody very much.

  “Nothing to it, Big Guy. Apiece of cake.”

  The rightsists should be fish in a barrel, to use your vernacular. You are exactly what they want. A certified war hero.

  “I’m a war hero who lives with a Loghyr and a psychotic talking bird and my best friend is part elf.”

  All faults that are correctable. A man can come to the truth late. You can sell the rightsists because they want to be sold. Glory Mooncalled’s is the organization I am concerned about cracking.

  “Why bother? I don’t share your infatuation with Glory Mooncalled.”

  Truth be told, Garrett, I no longer share that infatuation with my y ounger self. When Mooncalled was a distant gadfly yanking the beards of the lords and ladies we love to hate it was easy to cheer him on. But he is among us now and the glimmers of purpose I catch are depressingly sinister. Perhaps the Mooncalled I treasured perished along with his dream of an independent Cantard. Or he may have elected to become Karenta ‘s great foe because we no longer have serious enemies but deserve them.

  “There’s that damned word again, Smiley.”

  Which word?

  ‘We.’ I find nonhumans fond of reminding th
e rest of us that Karenta is a human construct. They make big shows of negotiating exemptions from human law and rule.

  Excellent. Maintain that capacity for dredging up irrelevant sophistries and The Call will clutch you to its bosom. You may be promoted directly into their Inner Council.

  “I don’t want to do this.”

  There is little choice, Garrett. These are pivotal times. Everyone must take a stand before it ends. Who refuses will be devoured because he will be out there alone. But we who recognize the signs and portents have the opportunity to deflect or defeat the gathering darkness.

  “I know where I stand, Windy. But I’d rather be noble and honorable and defend true justice and the divine right of Karenta’s kings while I’m sitting in my office with a mug in my hand, chatting with Eleanor.”

  And you insist that I am lazy.

  “Only because you have no more ambition than a bone that’s been buried for twenty years. You don’t have to go out there and try to run between the raindrops, partner.”

  That is another matter which warrants future discussion.

  26

  “Right on time,” I said when somebody hammered on my door late in the afternoon.

  Belinda said, “My people are expected to be punctual and to do their jobs well. And they deliver.”

  “You should take life easier, Belinda. You don’t always have to be —”

  “I try, Garrett. But some demon keeps pushing me. I can’t beat it. And it’ll get me killed eventually.”

  I nodded. That came with the territory. I looked out the peephole. An unfamiliar hulking creature of mixed ancestary shuffled impatiently on my front stoop. “I think I understand. Is this thing somebody you know?”

  She leaned past me, so close I had trouble breathing normally. “That’s Two Toes Marker. My driver.”

  “Driver? He looks like he wrestles ogres for a living.”

  “He looks badder than he is. He doesn’t move very well anymore.”

  Two Toes knocked again. Despite plaster dust falling all over the house Dean didn’t come out of the kitchen. He was exasperated with everybody. And for once he did put the blame where it always belongs: squarely on the shoulders of the Dead Man.