Angry Lead Skies

41

"You still have a trail?" I asked Singe.

"Yes. Getting better than it was."

I grunted. I didn't try to shortcut this time, though I expected the track to lead us straight to Saucerhead.

Which it did. More or less. Though Tharpe wasn't at his post.

I didn't even ask. I just left Singe to work her wonders.

"It is not entirely clear but it seems that Mr. Tharpe accompanied Mr. Playmate. Or he followed him within a very short time."

"And they went over to that ugly yellow building, right?"

"They were headed in that direction when they left here."

That was Singe. Making no assumptions.

"Can you detect any other odors here? That you might've noticed in that place we just visited?"

"That blond woman was here earlier today. And maybe others who left traces in that building. The odors are very faint."

"But there's nothing to contradict the story Cassie told us?"

"You do not trust her?"

"I've found that it's best to trust no one completely when I'm working a case. Nobody is ever completely honest with me."

"Truly?"

"Truly. Nobody wants to admit that they're desperate. But they are. Or they wouldn't come to me in the first place. They almost never do until things are out of hand. But that's human nature. You don't want people to know you can't manage your life. You're afraid to look weak."

We walked while Singe and I talked. I was moving more freely now but I still hurt. Doris and Marsha were doing a wonderful job of keeping their mouths shut. Dojango was still napping. He was in the cart.

I had everybody wait in front of the ugly yellow structure while I gave it a careful once-over from outside. The grolls attracted attention wherever they went, of course, but they knew how to discourage gawkers. A growl and a wave of the club each carried, more as decoration than as armament, were enough to discourage most people. For a while.

I wondered if they would use their clubs if pressed. They'd employed them during our visit to the Cantard but they hadn't really wanted to. They were actually gentle people, the Rose triplets. Though the two big ones did get a kick out of panicking people once in a while.

It seemed to me that it might be useful to know what was happening inside Casey's place before I went storming upstairs. "Doris. I need you to hoist me up so I can peek through a window."

Only there wasn't any window.

I stared at the blank brick, tried to visualize the inside of the tenement to see if I'd gotten turned around. I hadn't. So how had I misplaced a window made of glass?

I had Doris put me down. Then I worked my way around the ugly structure. It did have a few unglazed windows, but very few, indicating that it had been erected during the last attempt at establishing a window tax, with the minimum legal number of openings. None of the existing windows were on the fourth floor.

What the hell?

Which was what the place had to be in summer.

"How high can you count?" I asked Doris.

"Garrett, I don't think questions like that are polite."

"You're probably right. But I suspect that I don't much care. Here's what I want. Six minutes after I go in the front door you take your club and knock a hole through the bricks right up there where I was feeling the wall. Don't be shy about it. Haul off and pound a hole right through."

"And then what? When they come to arrest me. Go down fighting? I don't think so."

"Hey... !"

"You're a big-time bullshitter, Garrett, but you ain't big-time enough to bullshit me out of knocking somebody's building down."

"All right. All right." The recent outbreak of law and order was getting to be a real pain. "So don't bust a hole through the wall. Just thump on it hard enough to distract whoever's on the other side. Better give me eight minutes to get up there, though. That's a lot of stairs."

Doris grunted, shuffled over to his brother. They muttered at one another, not pleased because whatever happened here would do so in front of witnesses.

The grolls were beginning to attract gawkers who wouldn't run from a growl and a brandished club. Mostly they were youngsters who should've been asleep, but adults would gather, too, if it became obvious that the grolls would have some entertainment value.

"Singe, you come with me." I headed for the entrance to the tenement. That was filled with spectators who wanted to know what was going on. "We're hunting for Kagyars," I told them, which dumbfounded everyone.

The people of TunFaire and Karenta aren't much interested in their own history.

My remark would've melted their spines half a millennium earlier. The Empire was still in place then but was suffering a swift decline because it was being choked to death by fanatic members of the Orthodox Rite. The Kagyars had been members of a gentle, nonviolent heretical cult whose beliefs must've terrified the hierarchy of the established religion. They invested all their energies and all the treasure of the state in a hundred-year campaign to exterminate the Kagyar heresy.

All that horror and cruelty and evil and today not one Karentine in a thousand can tell you what a Kagyar was. Possibly not even one in ten thousand.