Angry Lead Skies

9

Kip tired of filing his metal wheel. He put it aside and started fiddling with something wooden. I watched from the corner of one eye while I thumbed through Playmate's drawings and sketches. The man really was good. More so than with portraits, he had a talent for translating Kip's ideas into visual images. There was a lot of written information on some of the sheets, inscribed in a hand that was not Playmate's.

"How do you come up with this stuff?" I asked Kip. I didn't expect an answer. If he heard it at all the question was sure to irritate him. Creative people get it all the time. They get tired of questions that imply that the artist couldn't possibly produce something out of the whole cloth of the mind. It was a question I wouldn't have asked a painter or poet.

Kip surprised me by responding, "I don't know, Mr. Garrett. They just come to me. Sometimes in my dreams. I've always had ideas and a head full of stories. But lately those have been getting better than they ever were before." He did not look up from the piece of wood he was shaping.

He had become a different person now that he was settled in the sanctuary of his workshop. He was calm and he was confident.

I wondered how much puberty had to do with his problems and creativity.

Tucked into the back of Playmate's folio, folded so I nearly overlooked them, were four smaller sketches of strange "elves."

"Would these be some of the people who're giving you a hard time?"

The boy looked up from his work. "Those two are Noodiss and Lastyr. Left and right. They're the good ones. I don't know the other two. They may be some of the ones Play ran off."

Playmate arrived with the tea. "They are."

"I told you your talent would be a wonderful tool in the war against evil. See? We have two villains identified already."

"Do we, then?"

No, we doedn't, doed we? We had sketches of a couple of likely baddies about whom we knew nothing whatsoever. I wasn't even sure they were the same kind of elves as the other two. They didn't look like the same breed in the sketches.

I changed the subject. "I have an idea, too."

Man and boy looked at me skeptically.

"It can happen!" I insisted. "Look. You see how much work it was making the steering handles for your three-wheel? You could use ox horns instead. You could get them from the slaughterhouses." Though the two of them began to look aghast I warmed to greater possibilities. "You could get them to save you the whole skull with the horns still attached. You could produce a special death's-head model three-wheel for customers from the Hill."

Playmate shook his head. "Drink your tea, Garrett. And plan to go to bed early tonight. You need the rest." I offered him a hard glower.

Guess I need to practice up. He wasn't impressed. He just smiled and told me, "You're starting to hallucinate."

"And I should leave that to the experts. All right. Why don't I do some work? What can you tell me about these maybe elves that you haven't told me already?"

"They eat a lot of ugly soup," Playmate told me. "My drawings don't do them justice."

None of them appeared particularly repulsive to me. And I said so. Those homely boys didn't know it but I was looking out for them.

"Call it an inner glow kind of thing. You'll see what I mean when you meet one." He sounded confident that I'd do so.

"Kip? Anything you can say to help out here? It's really your ass that's on the line."

Playmate advised, "Despite earlier events Kip still isn't quite convinced that he's in any trouble himself."

Most people are that way. They just can't believe that all this crap is raining down on them. Not even when somebody is using a hammer to beat them over the head. And they particularly can't believe that it's because of them.

We talked while we enjoyed our tea. I asked more questions. Lots of questions, most of them not too pointed. I didn't get many useful answers. Kip never said so, of course, but now that he was where he felt safe himself his main concern was his friends with the absurd names. He had decided that not telling me anything was the best way to shield them.

"It's not me you need to protect them from," I grumbled. "It's not me that's looking for them." He might not know exactly where they were hiding but I was willing to bet he had a good idea where to start looking.

Playmate offered nothing but a shrug when I sent him a mute look of appeal. So he was going to be no help.

Playmate is a firm believer in letting our young people learn from their mistakes. He had enlisted me in this thing because he wanted to keep Kip's educational process from turning lethal. Now he was going to step back and let events unfold instructionally.

"You do know that I'm not real fond of bodyguard work?" I told Playmate.

"I do know you're not fond of any kind of work that doesn't include the consumption of beer as the main responsibility of the job."

"Possibly. But asking me to bodyguard is like asking an opera diva to sing on the corner with a hurdy-gurdy man. I have more talent than that. If you just want the kid kept safe you should round up Saucerhead Tharpe." Tharpe is so big you can't hurt him by whacking him with a wagon tongue and so dumb he won't back off from a job as long as he's still awake and breathing.

"It was your remarkable talents that brought me to your door," Playmate responded, his pinky wagging in the wind as he plied his teacup. "Saucerhead Tharpe resembles a force of nature. Powerful but unthinking. Rather like a falling boulder. Unlikely to change course if the moment requires a flexible response. Unlikely to become proactive when innovation could be the best course."

I think that was supposed to be complimentary. "You're blowing smoke, aren't you? You can't afford Saucerhead." I'd begun roaming through the junk and unfinished inventions, growing ever more amazed. "He'd want to get paid up front. Just in case your faith in him was misplaced."

"Well, there is that, too."

The rat. He'd counted on the Dead Man's curiosity to keep me involved with this nonsense, whether or not I got paid.

Don't you hate it when friends take advantage of you? I picked up the most unusual crossbow I'd ever seen. "I used to be pretty good with one of these things. What's this one for? Shooting through castle walls?" Instead of the usual lever this crossbow was quipped with a pair of hand cranks and a whole array of gears. Cranking like mad barely drew the string back. Which was a misnomer. That was a cable that looked tough enough for towing canal boats.

"We're trying to develop a range of nonlethal weaponry, too," Playmate told me. "That's meant for knocking down a man in heavy armor without doing any permanent injury."

I didn't ask why you'd want to do that. Didn't mention that, sooner or later, the guy was going to get back up and get after you with renewed enthusiasm. I just hefted the crossbow. "Supposed to be a man-portable ballista, eh?" It had some heft to it.

"The bolts are there in that thing that looks like a pipe rack."

"Huh?" I wouldn't have recognized them otherwise. They looked more like miniature, deformed juggler's clubs. Two had padded ends. Again I refrained from telling Playmate what I thought.

I believe I understood what Morley feels each time I shy off what I consider gratuitous throat-cutting. Playmate's boundary of acceptable violence was as much gentler than mine as mine was gentler than friend Morley's.

I loaded one of the quarrels, looked around for a target, shrugged when Playmate grumbled, "Not inside, Garrett," exactly as he no doubt had at Kip a few hundred times.

"All right," I said. "Kip. You never did tell me why these elves want to catch your friends with the strange names."

"I don't know." He didn't look at me. He was a lousy liar. It was obvious that he had some idea.

I looked at Playmate. He gave me a little shrug and a little headshake. He wasn't ready to push it.

I asked, "So where do we go from here?"

Playmate shrugged again. "I was looking at doing the trapdoor spider thing."

"That'll work."

The trapdoor spider hunkers down in a hole, under a door she makes, and waits for somebody edible to come prancing by. Then she jumps out and has lunch. Playmate's reference, though, was to an ambush tactic used by both sides in the recent war in the Cantard, employing the same principle. He meant he was going to sit down and wait for something to happen.