Faded Steel Heat

87

Sometimes I've got an edge like a brick. We must've traveled half a mile before I realized, "Hey! We're not headed for The Palms."

"An' I tole da boss ya'd never notice. Dey's people followin' ya, ya know? An' dey's maybe not all da kind what ya want to know ya got da boss for a fren'."

"There's times I wonder about that myself," I grumbled, having noticed a green and red and yellow and blue ringer amongst the nearest gang of eaves-perching pigeons. A puff of cooler wind raced down the street, which seemed unnaturally calm for late afternoon in a city mad for bickering. Autumn would be along soon. Maybe, if I got lucky, the Goddamn Parrot would have a little goose in him and would head north for the winter.

I suspected we were headed for Playmate's stables, though, as a gods-fearing, righteous man Playmate doesn't have much use for Morley. Any tail who knew much about me probably developed the suspicion before I did. I wasn't concentrating. I had found a thread to worry.

We rounded a corner, turning left. Puddle was street side of me. Two steps later he leaned into me. Hard. I staggered through an open doorway. Before I could growl Puddle started pushing. I just glimpsed an old woman squinting at something she was sewing and a homely youngster probably of the female calling who shut the door behind the fat man. Then we reached the end of the narrow, almost barren tailor shop. I looked down steep steps. A light burned a long way below. "Go," Puddle urged.

I went.

A door closed behind us. It hung crookedly. The stairs had no business surviving our combined weight. Puddle picked up the light off the earthen cellar floor once we got down. It consisted of a cracked teacup half-filled with oil. The wick was a floating glob of lint. Puddle could carry the damned thing. It looked hot. And he knew where we were headed.

"Morley really this concerned?"

"Bad tings goin' on out dere, Garrett. It don't hurt none ta be careful."

Everybody in town was more paranoid than me. Maybe I should get a little crazy myself. "It'll all work out. History's drama has got a way of doing that." But it sure can get rough on the cast and crew.

"Ya ever go ta da plays? Dey's a great new one at da Strand, I been ta see it t'ree times already. Called Atterbohns da Toid on account of it's about King Atterbohns, one a da ones from way back."

I was surprised. The Strand doesn't put on the kind of show I'd associate with a mind like Puddle's. Hardly anybody would take their clothes off.

The more excited he grew the denser his speech became. "Dat's da Atterbohns what murdered his brodder and married his sister an' had a baby by her dat grew up ta help his gran'ma raise dis army aginst his fodder... " He whooped off and gave me every detail, half of which were historically inaccurate. Not having seen the drama myself I couldn't tell if the fault was his or the playwright's. The historical Atterbohns married his brother's widow, his sister-in-law, a perfectly respectable thing for the time, though murder was a bit of a gaffe. Less respectable was the fact that the sister-in-law orchestrated everything, including numerous other murders and the revolt of the son—who perished, along with his grandmother, in questionable circumstances later, to be followed to the throne by a six-year-old brother whose paternity was somewhat dubious.

A play about Atterbohns III would have to be one of the new tragedies. Its moral would be too dark and heavy for a passion play or traditional comedy. "I might go see it just to see how much license the playwright took with history. Who wrote it?"

"I dunno. We get ta da end a dis tunnel, ya gotta be quiet. It runs inta anudder one dat ain't ours. We don't wanna attrack no attention."

TunFaire has a million secrets. They probably extend two miles down into the earth and two up into the air. Were there enough overlapping tunnels for me to sneak all the way downtown to the brewery caverns? That sent me into a tumult of speculation. If all the tunnels and caverns under TunFaire were connected, control of them would be a major asset.

There were rumors and legends about people and things supposedly living underground. One beaut involved a king of the ratpeople who was a sort of cross between a high priest and Chodo Contague, a ratman wish-fantasy, something a Reliance would be if he had a whole lot of brains and guts and luck.

Surprisingly, none of the legends featured dwarves.

Puddle made a right turn when the tunnel ended. I stayed quiet, as instructed. Eventually we found a stairway from the same litter as the one leading down from the seamtress's shop. A door stood ajar at the top. A gray light outlined it. I let Puddle get all the way up before I risked the steps myself. Having survived him I knew they would support me.

I stepped into the entry foyer of a tenement that decades ago had entertained middle-class pretensions. Not a soul was around. The place even lacked the usual squallings of infants, yellings of husbands and fathers, shriekings of wives and mothers, whimpers of despair that characterize such places. But you could almost feel the tenants holding their breaths behind their curtained doorways. The cellar door standing ajar must be an omen of dreadful portent.

Puddle was puffing so hard I thought he'd collapse. He wasted no energy. He used his gasps to extinguish the light, which he left on the step behind the cellar door. He closed that.

We hit the street. Five blocks later we joined Morley in a dwarfish hole-in-the-wall. None of the hairy folk seemed to mind his elven blood.

"What was that all about?" I asked. "Other than the obvious."

"The people following you have a supernatural knack for keeping track. It wanted to test its limits."

"That's all?"

"There's more. In back." He nodded. I preceded him past a dwarfish staff who saw nothing. We were ghosts.

The quest for profit makes for strange bedfellows.