Pokey leaned back and patted his stomach, drenched Dean with a bucket of bullhooly, belched, and looked at me. “So let’s have it, Garrett.”
I lifted an eyebrow. It’s one of my best tricks. I’m working on my ear-wiggling. I know the ladies will love that.
“You took on a client you want to farm out,” Pokey went on without waiting. “Good-looking woman with style, I’d guess, or she wouldn’t have gotten past Dean. And if she had, you wouldn’t have listened to her.”
Had he been listening at the keyhole? “Regular deductive genius isn’t he, Dean?”
“If you say so, sir.”
“I don’t. He was probably hanging around trying to beg crumbs from our castoffs.” I told Pokey the story. All I left out was the size of the retainer. He didn’t need to know that.
“Sounds like she’s running a game,” Pokey agreed. “You said Jill Craight?”
“That’s the name she gave. You know it?”
“Seems like I should. Can’t put a finger on why.” He used his pinkie to scratch the inside of his ear. “Couldn’t have been important.”
Dean produced a peach cobbler, something he’d never do without company present. It was hot. He buried it in whipped cream. Then he served tea. Pokey went to work like he wanted to store up fat for the next ice age.
Afterwards we leaned back, and Pokey lighted one of those savage little black stink sticks he favors, then went to catching me up on the news. I hadn’t been out of the house for days. Dean hadn’t kept me posted. He hoped silence would drive me out. He never says so but he worries when I’m not working.
“The big news is Glory Mooncalled did it again.”
“What now?” Glory Mooncalled and the war in the Cantard are special interests around my house. When he’s awake the Dead Man makes a hobby of trying to predict the unpredictable, the mercenary Mooncalled.
“He ambushed Fire lord Sedge at Rapistan Sands. Ever heard of it?”
“No.” That was no surprise. Glory Mooncalled was operating farther into the Venageti Cantard than any Karentine before him. “He took Sedge out?” It was a safe guess; his ambushes had yet to fail.
“Thoroughly. How many left on his list?”
“Not many. Maybe three.” Mooncalled had begun his war on the Venageti side. The Venageti War Council had managed to tick him off so bad he’d come over to Karenta vowing to collect their heads. He’d been picking them off ever since.
He’s become a folk hero for us ordinary slobs and a big pain in the patoot for the ruling class, though he’s winning their war. His easy victories have shown them to be the incompetents we’ve always known they are.
Pokey said, “What happens when he’s done and all of a sudden we don’t have a war for the first time since before any of us were born?”
The Dead Man had an answer. I didn’t think it would go over with Pokey. I changed the subject. “What’s the latest on the temple scandals?” Playmate had tried to give me the scoop but his heart hadn’t been in it. The scandals weren’t the circus for him they were for me. His religious side was embarrassed by the antics of our self-anointed spiritual shepherds.
“Nothing new. Plenty of finger-pointing. Lot of ‘I was framed.’ On the retail level it’s still at the swinging-drunks-in the-tavern stage.”
For now. It would turn grim if Prester Legate Warden Agire and his Terrell Relics didn’t turn up.
Agire was one of the top ten priests of the squabbling family of sects we lump together as Orthodox. His title Prester indicated his standing in the hierarchy, at about the level of a duke. Legate was an imperial appointment, supposedly plenipotentiary, in reality powerless. The imperial court persists and postures at Costain but has had no power for two hundred years. It survives as a useful political fiction. Warden is the title that matters. It means he’s the one man in the world entrusted with guardianship of the Terrell Relics.
Agire and the Relics had disappeared.
I don’t know what the Relics are. Maybe nobody but the Warden does anymore. He’s the only one who ever sees them. Whatever, they’re holy and precious not only to the Orthodox factions but to the Church, the Eremitics, the Scottites, the Canonics, the Cynics, the Ascetics, the Renunciates, and several Hanite creeds for whom Terrell is only a minor prophet or even an emissary of the archenemy. The bottom line is that they’re important to almost all the thousand and one cults with followings in TunFaire.
Agire and the Relics had vanished. Everyone assumed the worst. But something was wrong. Nobody claimed responsibility. Nobody crowed over having gotten hold of the Relics. That baffled everybody. Possession of the Relics is a clear claim for the favor of the gods.
In the meantime, the whispering war of revelation had intensified. Priests of various rites had begun whittling away at rivals by betraying their venalities, corruptions, and sins. It had begun as border-incident stuff, little priests excoriating one another for drunkenness, for selling indulgences, for letting their hands roam during the confessional.
The fun had spread like fire in a tenement block. Now a day was incomplete without its disclosure about this or that bishop or prester or whatnot having fathered a child on his sister, having poisoned his predecessor, or having embezzled a fortune to buy his male mistress a forty-eight-room cabin in the country.
Most of the stories were true. There was so much real dirt, fabrication wasn’t necessary — which satisfied my cynical side right down to its bunions. Reputations were getting reaped in windrows, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys.
Pokey was bored by the whole business. If he had a weakness it was his narrowness. His work was his life. He could talk technique or case histories forever. Otherwise, only food held his attention.
I wondered what he did with his money. He lived in a scruffy one-room walk-up although he worked all the time, sometimes on several projects at once. When clients didn’t find him, he went looking. He even went after things — deadly things — just to satisfy his own curiosity.
Whatever, he didn’t feel like yakking up old news. His belly was full. I’d tantalized him with a wicked aroma. He wanted to get hunting.
I helped him puff Dean’s ego, then walked him to the door. I sat down on the stoop to watch him out of sight.
4
The descending sun played arsonist among high, distant clouds. There was a light breeze. The temperature was perfect. It was a time to just lean back and feel content. Not many of those times fell my way.
I yelled for beer, then settled in to watch Nature redecorate the ceiling of the world. I didn’t pay attention to the street. The little man was there on the stoop, making himself at home, passing me the big copper bucket of beer he’d brought, before I noticed him.
Up to no good? What else? But the beer was Weider’s best lager. I don’t get it that often.
He was a teeny dink, all wrinkled and gray, with a cant to his eyes and a yellow of tooth that suggested a big dollop of nonhuman blood. I didn’t know him. That was all right. There are a lot of people I don’t know, but I wondered if he was one of the ones I wanted to keep on not knowing.
“Thanks. Good beer.”
“Mr. Weider said you’d appreciate it.”
I’d done a job for Weider, rooting out an in-house theft ring without getting his guilty children too dirty. To discourage a relapse the old man kept me on retainer. I wander around the brewery when I have nothing better to do. I make people nervous there. Considering what he’d been losing, I’m cheap insurance. The retainer isn’t much.
“He tell you to see me?”
The dink took the bucket back, sipped like an expert. “I’m unfamiliar with many facets of the secular world, Mr. Garrett. Mr. Weider is face-to-face with it every day. He said you were the man I need. Provided, as he put it, I can pry you off your dead ass.”
That sounded like Weider. “He’s more achievement oriented than I am.” And how. He started out with nothing; now he’s TunFaire’s biggest brewer and has fingers in
twenty other pies.
“So I gather.”
We passed the bucket back and forth.
He said, “I looked you over. You seem perfect for my needs. But the factors that make you right make it hard to recruit you. I have no way to appeal to you.”
It was a mellow evening. I was too lazy to move. I had nothing else on my mind but a couple of oddballs down the way who were dead ringers for a couple of oddballs who were hanging around last time I came out. “You bought the beer, friend. Speak your piece.”
“I’d expected that courtesy. Trouble is, once I tell you the cat will be out of the bag.”
“I don’t gossip about business. That’s bad for business.”
“Mr. Weider did praise your discretion.”
“He’s got reason.”
We went back and forth with the beer. The sun ambled on. The little guy held a conference with himself to see if his trouble was really that bad.
It was worse, probably. Usually they’re going down for the third time when they ask for help — and then they want to sneak up on it like a virgin.
“My name is Magnus Peridont.”
I didn’t wilt. I didn’t gasp or faint. He was disappointed. I said, “Magnus? Nobody in real life is named Magnus. That’s a handle they stick on some guy who’s been dead so long everybody’s forgotten what a horse’s ass he was.”
“You’ve never heard of me?”
It was one of those names you ought to know. It had turned up on a loo wall somewhere, or something. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”
“My father thought I was destined for greatness. I’m sure I was a disappointment. I’m also known as Magister Peridont and Peridontu, Altodeoria Prin-ceps.”
“I hear a distant campanile.” A Magister is that rarest of all fabulous beasts, a sorcerer sanctioned by the Church. The other title was a relic of antiquity. It meant something like he was a Prince of the City of God. There was a bunk in heawn with his name on it, guaranteed. The bosses of the Church had-made him a saint before he croaked.
A thousand years ago that would have made his a dyed-in-the-wool, hair-shirt-wearing, pillar-sitting holy man. These days it probably meant he scared the crap out of everybody and they wanted to buy him off with baubles.
I asked, “Would Grand Inquisitor and Malevechea fit in there somewhere?”
“I have been called those things.”
“I’m getting a fix on you.” That Peridont was one scary son-of-a-bitch. Luckily, we live in a world where the Church is always one gasp short of being a dead issue. It claims maybe ten percent of Karenta’s human population and none of the nonhuman. It says only humans have souls and other races are just clever animals capable of aping human speech and manners. That makes the Church real popular with the clever animals.
“You’re dismayed,” he said.
“Not exactly. Say I have philosophical problems with some of the Church’s tenets.” Elfish civilization antedates ours by millennia. “I didn’t know Mr. Weider was a member.”
“Not in good standing. Call him lapsed. He was born to the faith. He spoke to me as a favor to his wife. She’s one of our lay sisters.”
I remembered her, a fat old woman with a mustache, always in black, with a face like she had a mouth full of lemons. “I see.”
Now that I knew who he was, we were on equal ground. Now he needed leading around to the point. “You’re out of uniform.”
“I’m not making an official representation.”
“Under the table? Or personal?”
‘’ Some of both. With permission.”
Permission? Him? I waited.
“My reputation is greatly exaggerated, Mr. Garrett. I’ve encouraged that for its psychological impact.”
I grunted and waited. He didn’t look old enough to have done all the evil laid at his doorstep.
He said, “Are you aware of the tribulations besetting our Orthodox cousins?”
“I haven’t been so entertained since my mother took me to the circus.”
“You’ve put a finger on the crux, Mr. Garrett. The mess has become a popular entertainment. There are no heretics more deserving of Hano’s justice than the Orthodox. But no one views these events as a scourging. And that fills me with dread.”
“Uhm?”
“Already the rabble have begun to step forward with revelations just to keep the pot boiling. I fear the day when the Orthodox vein plays out and they seek new lodes.”
Ah. “You think the church might be next?” That wouldn’t break my heart.
“Possibly. Despite my vigilance, some will stumble into sin. But no, my concern isn’t for the Church, it’s for Faith itself. Every revelation slashes Belief with a brutal razor. Already some who never questioned have begun to wonder if all religion isn’t just a shell game perpetrated by societies of con men who milk the gullible.”
He looked me in the eye and smiled, then passed the beer. That could have been a quote. And he knew it. He had done his homework.
“You have my attention.” I suddenly knew how Pokey felt when he took a job just to satisfy his own curiosity.
He smiled again. “I’m convinced there’s more here than a scandal gone brushfire. This is being orchestrated. There’s a malign force bent on savaging Faith. I think a rock needs to be lifted and that social scorpion revealed.”
“Interesting and interestinger. I’m surprised by your secular way of stating it.”
He smiled again. The Grand Inquisitor was a happy runt. “The diabolical provenance of the attack is beyond question. What interests me are the identities, resources, goals, and whatnot of the Adversary’s mun-dane adjuncts. All that can be defined in secular terms, like a street robbery.”
And a robbery could, no doubt, be defined in sectarian cant.
The runt seemed awfully reasonable for a supposed raving fanatic. I guess the first talent a priest develops is acting ability. “So you want to hire me to root out the jokers putting the wood to the Orthodox priesthoods.”
“Not exactly. Though I have hopes that their unmasking will be a by-product.”
“You just zigged when I zagged.”
“Subtlety and credibility, Mr. Garrett. If I hire you to find conspirators and you unearth them, even I couldn’t be completely sure you hadn’t cooked the evidence. On the other hand, if I hire a known skeptic to search for Warden Agire and the Terrell Relics and in the course of the hunt he kicks some villains out of the weeds. …”
I took a long drink of his beer. “I admire your thinking.”
“You’ll take it on, then?”
“No. I can’t see getting in a mess just for money. But you know how to pique a guy’s curiosity. And you know how to scheme a scheme.”
“I’m prepared to pay well. With an outstanding bonus for recovery of the Relics.”
“I’ll bet.”
The Great Schism between Orthodoxy and its main offshoot happened a thousand years ago. The Ecumenical Council of Pyme tried to patch things up. The marriage didn’t last. The Orthodox snatched the Relics in the settlement. The Church has been trying to snatch them back ever since.
“I won’t press you, Mr. Garrett. You were the best man for the job, but for that reason the least likely to take it. I have other options. Thank you for your time. Have a nice evening. Should you have a change of heart, contact me at the Chattaree.” He and his bucket marched off into the dusk.
I was impressed with the little guy. He could be a gentleman when he wanted. You don’t see that much in people accustomed to power. And he was one of the most feared men in TunFaire, within his sphere. A holy terror.
5
Dean stepped outside. “I’ve finished up, Mr. Garrett. I’ll be going home if there’s nothing else.”
He always talks like that when he wants something. Right now he hoped I’d have that something else. He lives with a platoon of spinster nieces who make him crazy.
One of the legacies of the war in the Cantard is a surplus of women. For deca
des Karenta’s youth have gone south to capture the silver mines and for decades half of them haven’t come back. It makes it nice for us unattached survivor types, but hell on parents with daughters to support.
“I was sitting here thinking it would be a nice evening for a walk.”
“That it would be, Mr. Garrett.” When the Dead Man is sleeping somebody always stays in to bolt the door and wait for whoever is out. When the Dead Man is awake we have no security problems.
“You think it’s too early to see Tinnie?” Tinnie Tate and I have a tempestuous friendship. She’s the one they had in mind when they set the specs for redhead stereotypes, only they toned them down because nobody would believe the truth.
You might call Tinnie changeable. One week I can’t run her off with a stick, the next I’m tops on her hate list. I haven’t figured out the whys and wherefores.
I was listed this week. Past the peak and dropping but still in the top ten.
“It’s too early.”
I thought so, too.
Dean is in a bind where Tinnie is concerned. He likes her. She’s beautiful, smart, quick, more square with the world than I’ll ever be. He thinks she’s good for me. (I don’t dare risk his opinion on the flip-flop issue.) But he has all those nieces in desperate need of husbands and half a dozen have standards low enough to covet a prince like me, squeaky armor and all.
“I could go see how the girls are.”
He brightened, checked to see if I was teasing, and was set to call my bluff when he realized that would put me there while he was here, unable to defend their supposed virtues. He imagined me in there like a bull shoulder-deep in clover, like they couldn’t possibly have sense enough to look out for themselves. “I wouldn’t recommend that, Mr. Garrett. They’ve been especially troublesome lately.”
It was all a matter of perspective. They hadn’t troubled me. When I first took Dean on, they did. They kept me up to my ears in cookery, trying to fatten me up for the kill.