Angry Lead Skies

69

Dean didn't get the word. Or didn't care. He wakened me. His stern look of disapproval was the one he reserved for my sloth, brought out on occasions when he felt he couldn't state his opinion aloud. He would've employed an entirely different and much uglier scowl had he known about Evas or Fasfir.

He told me, "You need to get up. There are messages awaiting your attention. And Miss Winger is in the street outside, apprising the world of all your shortcomings."

"I doubt that. She hasn't had a chance to catalog them. Unless you've signed on as her adviser."

He plowed ahead. "And the workmen have arrived." He said that last quickly and softly, as though it was a minor, mooshy afterthought of no consequence whatsoever.

I didn't think about it. Which was the point.

John Stretch had cut Winger loose. Good for him. Good for her. Maybe not as good for me if she was going to roam the streets accusing me of being in cahoots with those ugly fraternal twins, Mal and Mis Feasance. Although I certainly had trouble imagining why she might do that, considering she slept in their bed herself, most nights.

"None of that sounds all that pressing to me," I grumbled, knowing he was going to be disgruntled simply because I was in bed when it was light outside already.

Dean shrugged. His usual, aggressive morning attitude seemed to have abandoned him. He was intrigued by something on the floor. Something he might possibly have last seen hanging off Fasfir. He frowned deeply as he tried to get a mental grasp on the facts.

I saw the change when he decided he was imagining things.

I said, "I'll be down in a few minutes."

On instructions from the Dead Man, Dean let Winger into the house. She stormed from the front door directly into the kitchen, where I was working on breakfast while surrounded by my harem. "Have a cup of tea, Winger." Then I said, "If you insist on being abusive I'll just chuck you right back out in the street. Where you can keep on entertaining the secret police spies who watch this place every minute."

Winger was wound up. She blistered the air with her extemporaneous remarks. However, mention of Relway's gang got her stuttering fast. Unfortunately for her immortality, I wasn't paying enough attention to recall her exact words for posterity. Which was probably just as well. She hadn't been doing a whole lot of nun-style talking.

"You're running around loose, aren't you?" I wedged the question in while pouring tea for myself and Evas, who seemed astounded that something like Winger existed. "Imagine that. And you didn't get one single precious little hair on your pretty head harmed, either. Amazing." I wasn't responsible but she didn't need to know that.

Winger thought some. The implications made her stumble some more. She decided to sit down and enjoy an eating contest with Singe—at least until she'd worked herself up for a fresh round of accusations.

Once she had her mouth full, I asked, "How did those ratmen manage to capture you? I expected something to happen. Morley was supposed to send some men to back you up. Didn't they show?"

"Those pussies?" I think that's what she said. Her mouth was still full of dribbling crumbs. "Those assholes ran out on me."

I sighed. That wasn't that hard to translate. It meant she'd been such a bitch that Morley's guys had decided that the job wasn't worth it, that Winger deserved whatever she got. Morley would back them up. And would demand that they be paid for their suffering. And he'd have the moral right of it, probably.

Winger remains her own worst enemy.

Maybe she ought to try a little adult education with Sarge.

Some crashing and banging started up front. "What the hell? Sounds like somebody's beating on the side of the house with a sledgehammer." For a moment I envisioned Doris doing to my house what he'd refused to do to Casey's place.

Nobody told me anything. But Dean's attitude suddenly seemed evasive.

I recalled his having said something about workmen.

I drained my teacup and headed for the front door, noting that I wasn't hurting much of anywhere this morning. Which was wonderful. And surprising. I ought to have some cramps, or something, considering the rigors of my instructional duties.

The racket got the Goddamn Parrot going. "Help! Help! Oh, Mister, please don't... " I leaned in to tell him, "Aw, shut yer ugly beak, ya little pervert," before I went on to the door. "Ain't nobody here who ain't heard it all before."

Wait.

"Huh?"

I believe we are about to have a caller.

"But somebody's trying to wreck the outside of the house."

Masons are removing a couple of bricks to permit the pixies access to the hollows in the middle course of the wall.

The outer walls of my place are three-course brick masonry, a very dark, blackish rough red brick. Typically, the center course of that sort of construction includes a lot of voids.

So some genius had gotten the notion that those voids could be turned into pixie apartments. Gah! Now I'd have them squabbling inside my walls, day and night.

I supposed chances were excellent the guilty genius spent most of his life making and unmaking messes in my kitchen.

As the Dead Man had predicted, someone knocked on the front door. The knock had that peremptory character I associated with the secret police, that combination of confidence and impatience.

Nor was my guess in error, though my visitor was no one I recognized. And had been chosen, no doubt, because of that fact. If they had to deal with me directly, they would show me too many faces to remember. "Yes?"

"Courier. I have a message for you from Colonel Block." A written message at that. He slapped a small, scroll-style document into my hand, then turned and took off, stepping like he was marching to a drumbeat pitched too high for human ears. He headed straight up the street to Mrs. Cardonlos' rooming house, probably to collect the daily reports. Which meant they'd given up bothering to pretend.

Well?

Reading, I closed the door with shoulder and elbow. "A report on what they've been doing about Reliance and some other rat gangsters using human slaves to manage their bookkeeping."

Generous of the colonel.

"Yes, indeed. And I'll tell you this. I wouldn't want to be a known ratman criminal right now." What Block was willing to commit to paper would be just the tip of the iceberg. And what he'd been willing to set down was so vicious and wicked that I felt belated reservations about having unleashed the whirlwind.

"Here's an interesting ‘Did you know?' Did you know that ratpeople, alone of all the intelligent peoples of TunFaire, have no legal standing whatsoever? Less, even, than an ox or a draft horse? That anyone can do just about any damned thing they want to them with complete legal impunity? Just the same as if they were regular rats?"

Easy to understand why, then, they would be bitter.

"Better believe." Not one in a hundred of my fellow royal subjects had a conscience sufficiently well developed to understand why I found that situation troubling, too.

Do not bruit that about. Few people know. Were that common knowledge, someone would soon be killing them for their fur or their teeth or their toenails, or something such.

And people capable of that were out there, strangers to conscience, remorse, and pity, who were constitutionally incapable of encompassing those concepts however often they were explained.

"I've unchained a beast."

This once may be for the best. Mr. Relway may know no limits but those he imposes from within. Which may make him appear infinitely ferocious even while those internal limits do exist. He will exterminate ratmen with wild enthusiasm but everyone who perishes will have been a true villain.

"Or if they weren't they wouldn't have gotten themselves dead. Right? I know that game of old."

Mr. Relway will dwindle away to that point someday, no doubt. But it won't be today. Today he still recalls that he's just a man. An overly idealistic sort of man.

"Shall I tell Singe?"

She will learn of it anyway.

"Tell Singe what?" Singe demanded, having entered the Dead Man's room soundly equipped to avoid starvation for at least a generation.

"That the Guard have attacked Reliance and several other leading ratmen. With the sort of acutely accurate intelligence you'd expect of Deal Relway. The Guard did it because Reliance has been keeping human slaves." Though the slaves' humanness shouldn't have mattered. Slavery at its most blatant and obvious has been outlawed for generations, no matter the race of the slave.

Today we have indenture and apprenticeship and several forms of involuntary servitude involving debtors and convicted criminals but nobody owns another intelligent being outright. In law. Sometimes reality can be pretty ugly.

Acute and accurate intelligence? Then how come they hadn't known about the slavery? Or had they?

My cynical side quickly had me wondering if the raids weren't just image-building stunts launched at this point only because somebody with a big mouth and an overly moralistic attitude now knew what the ratmen were doing.

I told Singe, "The attacks have been remarkably vicious and violent." Because the Guard wanted to make an unmistakable point. A major new power player had entered the lists.

There would be truly big trouble if Relway ever got so overconfident that he went after the Outfit. Because there are a whole lot more of their bad guys than there are of his good guys. And those bad guys have far greater resources.

"And this would be the insurance you were taking on my behalf?"

There was no ducking the truth. "No Reliance, no threat from Reliance."

Singe did not get upset with me. What distress she did betray she directed at herself. She might not have willed disaster to devour Reliance but a disaster had occurred on her account. "You are right, Garrett. You are completely right. Life is a bitch."

"And then you die."

"Will Humility be all right?"

"I don't know. I tried to warn him. I hope he listened. I think he's someone I could get along with. And what I do, it's all connections."

"What we do, Garrett."

I started to speak.

Might I suggest a level of caution usually reserved for speech in the presence of Miss Tate?

He might. But that didn't mean I had a whole lot of use for it.

Singe continued, "I am part of this team, now. And I am not really asking for a salary, or anything."

"Nobody draws a salary here. But the more people there are around here, the more work has to be done to keep everybody in clothing and food. And the way you keep putting it away... You aren't pregnant, are you?" All I needed was a horde of rat pups underfoot, atop the rest of the zoo.

Not a smart suggestion, Garrett. Not a smart suggestion.

He was right. I'd managed to offend Singe at last. And her main complaint was a sound one: I'd tossed off a remark like that without ever having bothered to learn enough about ratpeople to know that she couldn't get pregnant unless she was in season. Unlike human women. And she hadn't yet gone into season, except once, her first time, under rigorously controlled conditions, with her mother and some older sisters there to make sure nothing untoward happened.

"After the first time any ratgirl with half a brain can manage her schedule. I go to the same apothecaries human women do. And the same hedge wizards." Singe rolled up her left sleeve, showed me a fancy yarn amulet not unlike those worn by every human female I knew who'd passed the age of nine. This is a cruel, wicked, unpredictable, and exciting world. Bad things happen to good girls. Good things happen to bad girls. Nobody with any sense risks having her life shattered by chance joy or evil.

Which isn't to say that there aren't scores of accidents happening out there every day. Common sense isn't.

"It is really easy. But a lot of males do not want females controlling their fertility. And very few ratgirls are as courageous as I am. It takes a lot of nerve to sneak away and get fitted for an amulet. Even though everyone knows where to get one."

"What happens if you get caught using one of those things?"

"Basically, they get really unhappy with you but, mostly, they just take it away. Then they crowd you till your season comes on you. They believe that once a female has enjoyed a vigorous season of mating she won't want to delay another one ever again."

"Is that male arrogance? Or is it true?"

"I cannot tell you of my own certain knowledge. I have seen females little older than myself swilling an herb tea they believe will bring them into season sooner. At the same time taking other concoctions supposed to prevent pregnancy or to terminate one if it starts."

Sounded to me like love amongst the ratfolk could be as mad as it is amongst human folk.

"It is a good thing to be a girl who thinks ahead," Singe said. "So my older sisters tell me. They say a girl can futter herself blind for weeks on end if she makes the proper preparations and takes the right precautions."

I was beginning to get uncomfortable.

Singe fluttered her eyelashes. "Weeks."

My luck was mixed. That didn't go anywhere because Winger burst in. She started barking at the Dead Man and me. "You guys aren't gonna stiff me, Garrett."

"A straight line I cannot resist—"

"Don't give me no shit, Garrett."

"Winger, why do you have to be a pain in the ass every day of your life?" She wasn't, really. Most of the time she was good people. My directness startled her silent long enough for me to add, "I ought to hire the Rose brothers to follow you around with a couple of huge mirrors so every time you start in on somebody they can shove one in front of you so you can see what's happening."

Winger got a big, goofy look on her face. She isn't deep at all. She'll take that sort of remark literally, often as not. This time she cocked her head and thought about it for a few seconds before she decided it was just, somehow, some more of Garrett's candy-ass, goody two-shoes, crapola, pussy philosophy. A category which included anything I ever said that she didn't agree with or didn't understand. She gave her hair a violent toss. "You guys ain't gonna get outta giving me what I got coming."

"Oh, you're going to get what you've got coming. One of these days."

Her blind, fool, drunk good luck has got to run out someday.

Upon repeated advice from the Dead Man, in the face of my own deeply held principles, I sent Winger off with a little money in her pocket. She was happy to get it. She knew perfectly well that she didn't deserve it.

Now she'd go do some drinking, get into a fight with somebody who reminded her of her husband, maybe bed him if he survived the action. Then, while she was still drunk but already beginning to feel the bite of a hangover, she'd drag Saucerhead Tharpe out of bed and try to con him into helping her manage some criminal enterprise noteworthy for its complete boneheadedness. Like the time she got poor Grimmy Weeks drunk, bopped what little brains he had out, then talked him into helping her pilfer the Singing Sword of Holme Prudeald.

That damned sword has no value whatsoever. It's not fit for fighting and its only magical property is its ability to sing. Badly.

The damned blade never shut up after they pinched it. Everywhere Grimmy and Winger went, it boomed out off-key operatic arias about henpecked top gods, brothers who plooked their sisters in order to create psychopathic, dwarf-murdering heroes who tended to forget that they were married to defrocked, doomed, and not very bright Choosers of the Slain. Which might not have been too bad if Winger hadn't gotten a wild hair and tried to sell herself as the nimrod Chooser.

They say it made great street entertainment.

Winger panicked when she figured the sword's owner would get word. She did a runner when Grimmy had his back turned, leaving the poor befuddled dope holding the scabbard, so to speak.

I'm probably the only guy in town who bought Grimmy's sad story about the big blonde who'd led him to his despair.

If Grimmy survives four years of forced labor in the silver mines he'll return to the street having learned a valuable lesson about getting to know your partners in crime before you begin to work together.

She hadn't even given him her real name.

"Hey, Chuckles," I said, popping into the Dead Man's room. "What're we going to do with Casey and the girls?" The male silver elf was too much trouble to keep under control. But if we turned him loose he would become dangerous. And he didn't deserve to be turned over to the Guard. And I didn't want to kill him.

I have been giving that matter some thought. It is not simple. I have been unable to find a satisfactory answer yet. I will continue to reflect. Possibly Casey himself will present us with an idea.

That didn't seem likely.

I was in my office. After our recent power spending our financial picture was no longer rosy. I scowled. That might mean having to take on more work.

Evas eased into the room, cold and aloof and remote. Today she wore an unflattering tattered dress that had been handed down by one of Dean's much heftier nieces. The dress wouldn't have been flattering when it was new and on the form it fit. The weavers had strung a lot of ugly thread into the woof.

Evas closed the door. Then she began to change into the very friendly Evas. "I... cannot... wait." I got the sense that she was mildly ashamed of herself because she couldn't control herself.

After a while I managed to get away. The first tentacles of a marvelous idea had begun to stir in the darkened rooms at the back of my mind.

Damned if it didn't seem like Eleanor winked at me.

Had to be a good idea.

If I could survive the next few days...

"How well do you know my parrot?" I asked. "Come on. You should get to know him."