Singe had both paws clamped to her muzzle.
Gagging, I whispered, “Could you pick me out of this?”
Singe shook her head slightly, took a paw away from her muzzle long enough to tap her ear, reminding me that her people also had exceptional hearing. Then she dropped down so she could watch the street between bars that kept dogs, cats, and other sizable vermin from getting to the delicacies. They would have to stroll all the way down to the unlocked and open door if they wanted to compete with the bugs.
Singe beckoned me. I went for the fresh air.
I got down on the dirt floor, amongst the crud and the hair and the fleas off the pelts, and observed. And learned.
The first few hunters weren’t unusual. They were just thugs. But they were extremely nervous, very alert thugs. They were thugs whose main task was to protect a brace of extremely unhappy ratmen. The trackers kept glancing over their shoulders. I didn’t recognize anybody but wasn’t surprised. I didn’t know many members of the Guard. And Relway was enlisting fellow fanatics like harvesting dragons’ teeth.
Then I saw white boots. With platform soles and cracked, fake jewels. Bic Gonlit was up on top of them. The real Bic Gonlit. And Bic wasn’t alone. Nor was he in charge. His companion wore black as tattered as Bic’s white but was a lot more intimidating. He looked like he was about nine feet tall. He wore a mask. Arcane symbols in gold and silver spattered something like a monk’s hooded robe. An extremely threadbare robe. This particular stormwarden wasn’t enjoying a great deal of prosperity.
That would make him especially dangerous.
Singe was even more careful than I was about not attracting attention by breathing. Her people have nurtured that skill since their creation.
I didn’t recognize anybody but Bic.
My first inclination was to drop everything and head for home. Let Bic and the big boy play the game. Which is exactly what most people do and what all the big boys expect us to do. They count on that, up there on the Hill. They don’t know how to react when ordinary folks refuse to fold and fade.
Usually that’s followed by a lot of sound and fury and people getting hurt. Which explains the prevalent cowardly attitude.
Once they passed by, I whispered, “I’ve got Bic Gonlit figured out, now.” He’d taken Casey’s money. He’d underwritten his taste for high living by collecting books for Casey, but once things got real interesting the little pudgeball had made a fast connection up the Hill.
That being the case, why hadn’t any Hill-type visitors come to the house?
Maybe Brother Bic hadn’t made himself a deal so good that he felt like giving up everything he had, informationwise. Or, more likely, the Dead Man had revised his recollections before letting him leave the house.
You’ve got to keep an eye on the dead guy. He’s sneaky.
Old Bones has been getting slicker every day for a long time. He doesn’t keep me adequately informed, though, I thought. I must have an unrecognized tendency to blab all over town.
Another pack of intense bruno types came along, following Bic and his buddy in black. They were alert. They were all armed, too, though that was against the law.
Once again, neither Singe nor I breathed.
I’d love to see Relway attempt to impose his idealistic, no exceptions, rule of law outlook on the lords of the Hill. Or even on their minions.
The resulting fireworks would make for great popular entertainment.
Bic’s stride faltered. He stopped. He seemed uncertain.
He bent to caress his ragged magic boots. Frowning, he looked straight at me, though without seeing me. He frowned, shook his head, said nothing to the ragged wizard. The stormwarden beckoned two ratman trackers. A conference ensued.
The whole crew had become confused.
Nobody had the track now, by scent or by sorcery.
Singe pinched me.
79
I breathed, “This isn’t the time,” because she’d snuggled up like she wanted to get really friendly. It hadn’t ever gotten this complicated when I was running with Morley. Then Singe proved that I had misjudged her again.
She pointed back past the heap of possum and muskrat hides.
Several Visitors were up to something back there. Singe had pressed against me to make sure the invisibility spell concealed us both.
I whispered, “What the hell are they doing? They’re not supposed to be here.” One of the Visitors had his arm in a sling. Another seemed to have a broken leg. Evidently the Maskers hadn’t been able to work any medical magic.
Every Visitor carried at least one gray fetish and studied it intently.
I whispered, “There’re too many of them.” There were more here than the Masker four. I couldn’t get them all in sight at once but I definitely counted at least five Visitors. Though it was hard to tell one from another, even when the Visitor hailed from Evas’ crew. Unless you charmed them out of their silver suits.
I whispered, “We’re still blocks away from where John Stretch said they’re hiding.”
Singe murmured, “Quit whispering so much,” then added a thought I’d had already and didn’t want to be true. “Maybe they were warned about us coming. Maybe they are here because they expected us to go to the place where we were told that they would be hiding.”
Maybe. Because in TunFaire nothing ought to surprise you. The possible will happen. The impossible takes only a few minutes longer.
In this case the probabilities were apparent. Certain overly friendly Visitor ladies, desperate to get a ride home, had conned simple old Garrett into returning some Visitor fetishes they said they’d need in order to sneak in and join Evas in her adventures with Morley Dotes at The Palms. Taking advantage of simple old Garrett’s understandable and righteous desire to rectify a near-cosmic injustice.
If they got away I hoped the girls were dim enough to take the Goddamn Parrot with them.
Smirk. I’d have to remember to call the place The Joy House next time I dropped in at Morley’s. Smirk.
The extra Visitors lurking here had to be Lastyr and Noodiss, erstwhile missionaries. Just had to be. Because no Visitor would be going home if they couldn’t all work together, and the Maskers would have been gone already if they’d gotten reinforcements from the old country. The women in particular had to be extremely cooperative with the others. They were at everyone’s mercy.
Disdaining Singe’s advice, I whispered. “You watch them. I’ll keep an eye on the street.” The confusion out there had begun to commence to begin to get ready to head on out somewhere else.
Bic and his pal resumed moving, though confusion didn’t cease being their guiding spirit. They faded away.
I expected them back. You cast around a bit but you always return to the point where your track evaporated, to hunt for the one thing you missed the last time you looked.
Minutes later Singe murmured a grand understatement. “We should leave. Sooner or later they will stumble over us in spite of this invisibility amulet.”
“Or they might have some way to tell if an invisibility spell is being used anywhere nearby.” If I invented an invisibility-maker I’d sure try to come up with a way to tell if somebody else was using something like it around me.
“Or they might hear you whispering.”
That, too.
We’d come to the Embankment to find Visitors. Although this wasn’t quite the situation I’d hoped for. This wasn’t good. This didn’t fit in with my half-assed plans at all.
Singe was spot on about whispering. But she was a tad off when it came to who would do the eavesdropping.
Yikes! Here came Bic Gonlit and his threadbare stormwarden buddy, hustling like they were being driven by one of the wizard’s spooky winds. Their trackers and henchmen scampered along behind them, confused and alert and able to keep up only because Bic had those stubby little pins.
The flotilla’s course ran straight toward me.
I poked Singe, indicated that she should peek thr
ough the airhole. Once she’d done so we got up on our hind feet and, chest to chest, in careful lockstep, began to ease along the brick wall, toward the cover of another mound of hides. We found it necessary to freeze every few steps because the Visitors had become extremely nervous, suddenly. They were inclined to jump at the slightest sound.
They had to suspect that they had trouble in their hip pocket.
Several Visitors, fetishes extended before them, suddenly rushed the hide pile Singe and I had abandoned. Bic and his cohorts were causing a disturbance outside. And Singe and I hadn’t gotten but a dozen feet away. So we froze. And shivered. And held our breaths. And hoped nobody stumbled into us.
The Visitor with his arm in a sling missed running into me by scant inches.
Tension mounted amongst the Visitors. The advent of danger reawakened the bad feelings between the Maskers and Kip’s pals. I could sense just enough to tell that the Maskers blamed Lastyr and Noodiss for everything. Kip’s friends blamed the Maskers for zipping all over the sky, thereby alerting the savages to their presence.
Lastyr and Noodiss had abandoned the altruism that had brought them to TunFaire. In fact, prolonged exposure to our fair flower of a city had turned them bitter and cynical.
Imagine that.
Singe and I continued to move, teensy baby steps, then with more vigor once we realized that the people outside intended to come inside.
Visitors began flying all over the place. Two quite literally. I didn’t see any ropes or wires. “Keep moving,” I told Singe, in what I thought would be an inaudible whisper.
Visitors froze.
Something had changed. The Visitors were alert in a whole different way.
The Visitors then unfroze, every man jack getting busy with fetish boxes.
Those guys needed bandoliers to carry all the fetishes they had. Evidently every task imaginable could be managed with the right gray box.
Two Visitors headed our way, weaving slow, serpentine courses, zeroing in.
Bic’s gang poured through the open door.
Big surprises happened. For everybody.
The confusion attained an epic level.
At first it looked like it would be a walk for the startled Visitors. Thugs went down left and right, exactly as easily as I had in my first several encounters with Masker magic.
Then Bic came through the doorway.
The Visitor sorcery didn’t affect Little Bitty Big Boy.
Bic selected a paddle meant for stirring the contents of a curing vat. He took a swing at the nearest silver figure, which happened to belong to the Masker with the broken leg.
The Visitor rewarded Bic with a beaten-sheep sort of bleat.
The shabby stormwarden stepped inside. And instantly called down some of that old-fashioned thunder and lightning, the ability to control which gave stormwardens their name.
Weather magic is the flashiest and most obviously destructive power possessed by our lords of the Hill — and the most common.
Hides flew. Vats exploded. People shrieked. Bic Gonlit rose ten feet into the air, spinning faster and faster as he did so. The stormwarden followed, spinning himself. But he threw off spells like the sparks coming off one of those pinwheel fireworks.
I told Singe, “We really need to take ourselves somewhere else.”
The game looked like it was just starting to get serious.
“I thought you wanted to find the Visitors...”
“We found them. Now let’s take advantage of the fact that nobody here has us at the head of their to-do list right now.”
80
Pixies flitted around us, giggling and squabbling, more annoying than a flock of starving mosquitoes. Not a single one had anything useful to say. Their presence didn’t help anything. Singe and I weren’t invisible anymore. There was no need.
Nobody was interested in us. But the squawking bugs threatened to attract attention.
For the gawkers, trying to figure out what was happening in the slowly collapsing tannery, a guy hanging out with a ratwoman bold enough to walk the streets by daylight was a secondary spectacle.
Threads of blue light as thin as spider silk crawled over the ruins. The entire heap of rubble hurled itself skyward. Everything inside went up with the building itself. People and debris alike floated on the surface of an expanding, invisible bubble.
More time seemed to pass than actually did.
The bubble popped. And collapsed.
A raindrop smacked me in the cheek. I noted that a cold breeze had begun blowing. The change in weather wasn’t unseasonable or unlikely, it was just a surprise because I hadn’t been paying attention.
Vigorous lightning pranced over the remains of the tannery. One bolt struck something explosive, probably chemicals used for treating leather. The explosion scattered brick and broken timbers for a hundred yards around. A spinning sliver sixteen inches long flew between Singe and me, narrowly missing us both.
Singe said, “We have found them. Do we really need to stay so close, now?”
“I don’t know. You may have a point.” I spied a dirty white behind wagging as somebody struggled to back his way out of the mess. When the pile finally finished birthing Bic it developed that he had hold of his employer by the ankle. He strove to drag the wizard out by main strength.
I said, “I think we might move a little farther away.”
Lightning bolts, like swift left and right jabs, rained down on the ruins, starting small fires, flinging debris around. Despite his discomfiture and the inelegance of his situation the stormwarden was still in there punching.
Other things were happening at the same time. They were less intensely visual. I credited them to the Visitors because Bic’s gang were the people being inconvenienced.
Damn! We’d dropped the invisibility spell and were trying to fade into the onlookers but Bic spotted us almost immediately. But he didn’t get the chance to report us. A Visitor floated up out of the ruins, jabbed one of those gray fetishes in his direction. And he fell down, sound asleep. I wasn’t feeling real charitable. I hoped he woke up with a headache as ferocious as the worst I’d enjoyed back when they were knocking me out all day long.
I told Singe, “It’ll be a week before they get their stuff together back there. Let’s use the time.”
We did. To no avail whatsoever. Not only were the Maskers not hiding where John Stretch said, there was no sign of their skyship. I’d hoped it would be right there where I could sabotage it. Or whatever seemed appropriate at the moment of discovery.
Why would I want to keep them from going away? The longer they hung around the more likely they would fall into the hands of somebody off the Hill. Which would make times just that much more interesting for those of us who couldn’t fly away.
“Singe? You smell anything that might be the Masker skyship?”
She strained valiantly. And told me, “I can tell nothing. What happened back there has blinded my nose.”
Poor baby. “Follow me.” It was time to get the hell away from the Embankment.
Our line of retreat took us back past the ruined tannery.
Raindrops continued to strike randomly, scattered but getting fatter all the time. And colder. One smacked me squarely atop the bean. It contained a core of ice. It stung. I regretted my prejudice against hats.
“Look,” Singe said. We were slinking through the crowd of onlookers, which had swollen to scores, most of them tickled to see a stormwarden looking like he had a firm grip on the dirty end of the stick.
A groggy Bic was back up on one knee, a black-clad ankle still in hand, glaring at the mob, not a man of whom offered a hand. He spied somebody he thought he recognized, that somebody being Mama Garrett’s favorite boy. He croaked out, “Garrett!”
Garrett kept on rolling. Maybe a little faster. Garrett’s sidekick puffed and hustled to keep up.
Bic yelled as loud as he could. His excitement didn’t do him any good at all. The one response he did get was a growin
g hum that sounded like a swarm of bumblebees moving in for the kill. It came from within the rubble. Masker sorcery. Bic slapped another hand onto his boss’ ankle and went back to pulling.
“Look!” Singe gasped again.
The rubble had begun shifting and sliding as though restless giants were awakening underneath.
The bubble was coming up again. And now the bumblebees were singing their little bug hearts out.
The bubble got a lot bigger this time. Bricks and broken boards, ratmen and squealing henchmen all slid off. Bic forgot about me and Singe. He forgot his manners entirely. He yanked the mask off the stormwarden, slapped his face. I caught a glimpse of pallor disfigured by indigo tattoos. A real heartbreaker of a face. It must drive the hookers wild.
Something began rising up inside the bubble. Something shiny, like freshly polished sword steel.
The bumblebees lost the thread of their hearty marching song and began to whine. The bubble began to shrink and the steel to sink. But the bees picked up the beat after a few false notes.
The Masker skyship emerged from the ruins.
The addled stormwarden popped it with his best lightning bolt.
The skyship popped him back. Enthusiastically. He flew twenty yards, ricocheted off a brick wall, barely twitched once before an incoming Bic Gonlit, tumbling ass over appetite, crash-landed on top of him.
The Masker vessel lumbered into the sky and headed south, the bumblebees occasionally stumbling, the ship itself wobbling.
“A little faster with the feet, I think,” Singe said when I slowed to watch. “I am developing a strong need to find myself somewhere far away from here.” The crowd seemed to agree with her. Everybody thought it was time to be somewhere else.
“Yes, indeed, girl. Yes, indeed. Before old Bic wakes up and decides to blame us for everything.”
We did go somewhere else. But we weren’t much happier there than we’d been on the Embankment.