Angry Lead Skies

77

Singe and I set out about a week before my normal getup time. We headed for the Casey digs Belinda's connections had discovered. We didn't learn a thing there except that the Guard had the place under surveillance—a fact that would interest Miss Contague a great deal. We also learned that thugs I assumed to be Relway's were keeping watch on us loyal subjects, by means of some very clever operatives and tactics.

The shiftiest operatives alive have trouble keeping up when the folks they're watching can step around a corner and vanish. Which Singe and I did a few times. Then I decided it wouldn't be smart to give away the fact that we really could slide around a corner and disappear.

That invisibility fetish was a wonderful device. I didn't want it taken away by some Bubba Dreadlock.

The pursuit did a hell of a job of hanging on. I'd have to congratulate Block and Relway. Someday.

I told Singe, "We can't shake them. Every time we give them the slip they get right back on track after a while." I hadn't been too obvious about trying to lose them yet, however. I was just pretending to take normal precautions. I didn't want them to know that we knew we were the object of a massive tail.

Singe stopped being talkative as the morning wore on. Her shoulders hunched. She seemed to shrink. Maybe I did a little, too. We had reached the Embankment, which is an ancient docking and warehousing district along the riverbank north of the Landing. It's rough country and I don't know my way around there. Nor do I know a soul amongst its denizens, which isn't true of the waterfront on the south side. The Embankment seemed a bleaker, harsher, less colorful district than its more familiar cousin.

The Embankment is the jumping-off point and home base for all trade along the navigable waterways, some of which reach a thousand miles beyond Karenta's borders, a thousand miles into the heart of the continent. The south-side waterfront is the jumping-off point for what seems to me far more exotic destinations along the ocean coasts and overseas.

"What is that smell?" Singe asked.

"The sweet aroma of uncured animal hides." I was able to answer that one because of my intermittent association with the family Tate. "You won't believe this but there are men crazy enough to hunt thunder lizards and mammoths and saber-tithed toogers in the plains and mountains and forests back in places so far away they don't even have dwarves or elves there yet. Flatboats bring hides and teeth and horns and bones and ivory and fur and, sometimes, even meat down to TunFaire. And sometimes gold or silver or gemstones, or lumber or untaxed whiskey. It all gets unloaded right here on the Embankment." Where several of the bigger warehouses belong to the Contague family and store none of the mentioned goods except whiskey.

A broad range of herbs and spices grows wild in the interior, too.

But hunting is the thing.

A bold enough hunter, responding to the appropriate commercial demand, can set himself up for life by making a handful of the right kills. I expect a lot of bold veterans will toss the dice out there before long. And have enough success that the market for animal by-products will get shaky.

Perhaps the Crown ought to encourage homesteading. That would bleed off a lot of extra people.

Generally speaking, the quickest way to get dwarves to give up their silver and gold is to take it away, over their dead bodies. But if you can bring them the head of the right kind of thunder lizard—which they won't hunt themselves, no matter what—they'll throw gold dust at you like the bags are filled with sand. But that head has to come off an adult specimen of one of the major carnivores. Or off a three-horn or the rarer five-horn, because an infusion of powdered horn will scare impotence into the next continent.

I've never heard why dwarves covet the teeth of the great meat eaters, but who better than a lady dwarf to know, intimately, the meaning of rock hard?

Singe told me, "We must pass through this place that smells of old death."

"Huh?'

"The area where they make leather from those uncured animal hides."

"The tannery district." There were places which processed tallow and bone, too, though little of that would be imported. None of those places lacked their enthusiastic odors. "Why?"

"Someone is using ratman trackers to follow us. There can be no other explanation for their success. Yet few of my people have the courage to visit the fastnesses of death. Even if they forget that not many generations have passed since our own kind were killed and flayed to provide fashionable trousers for young dandies, the stench will overwhelm anything as subtle as traces left by you and me. Without leaving it obvious that we were trying to distort our backtrail."

"Ah, my friend, you continue to amaze me."

"A year from now you will be working for me."

There was a thought to rattle me.

Singe jumped up and down and clapped her paws. "I did it! I did it! You should see the look on your face."

"I believe I've created a monster."

Ratpeople aren't built to laugh but Singe sure did try. And she kept her mind on business while she was having fun. She led the way along a path a ratman tracker ought not to find suspicious, yet one that would overload any tracker's nose.

Singe was too naive to understand that anything not going his way would be suspicious to Director Relway.

I may have remained a little naive myself.

Not till after we had begun taking advantage of the district's natural odiferous cover did it occur to me that having Relway's fanatics on my backtrail might be a lesser evil.