Gilded Latten Bones

13

Somebody shoved against the door to the room so hard that the impact against my cot wakened me.

I got my feet under me. I stood the cot up against the wall. I was not in a good temper when I opened that door.

Miss T was my antagonist. I blurted, "What the hell? This isn't any time when a rational being. ."

I sniffed. Something smelled odd.

"Stuff it, Garrett."

Miss T had not come alone. That was Belinda Contague.

The smell came from behind me. I glanced at the window. It was dark outside, except for a three-quarters moon. "What the hell?"

One curtain bottom had been pushed a foot aside. Enough for me to see the moon in a cloudless sky. The window was up about three inches. I had left the curtains closed and the window shut.

The smell came from outside.

I forgot about the rude folks in the hall. Something more sinister had been going on. I might ought to be grateful that they had wakened me.

I went to the window. It would not open enough for me to lean out. Every shadow across the street, though, felt like it was hiding something rotten.

I said, "I'm way off my game. I might not be the man for this job, Belinda. Let me ask, less irritably, what's the occasion?"

Belinda took in the situation with the window. "I brought a healer." She and Miss T moved aside.

A small, well-rounded, bald-headed man passed between them. He sniffed the air. "I hope that's not your patient."

The healer wore dull black clothing in a style declared defunct a hundred fifty years ago. Deservedly. Clotheshorse Morley should have shrunk away even in a coma.

The healer belonged to a cult called the Children of the Light. Of the Dying Light. A prime tenet was no sexual conduct. They were militant pacifists, too-the kind willing to pound the snot out of you if you tried to claim that war might actually solve something. They were born-again do-gooders, as well, but so smugly self-righteous that most people loathed them. They ran soup kitchens. They ran shelters. They ran free clinics. They had made a bid for control of TunFaire's grand, totally corrupt charity hospital, the Bledsoe. They did a lot of good for a lot of people. Their healers were minor magic users. The Hill turned a blind eye to their unlicensed operations because they confined themselves to charity work.

Cynicism being my nature, when I thought about the Children, I mostly wondered where they got their funding.

Saving the life of a friend of the Queen of Darkness might shake loose a serious donation. Unless she decided to have the healer drowned so he wouldn't talk about Morley's condition or whereabouts.

"Excuse me," nameless round character said. Nobody made introductions. He pushed through and plopped his carpetbag down near the head of the bed. He began examining what was left of my friend.

I urged Belinda over to the window. I used my left thumb and forefinger to measure the gap before I shut it again. "As soon as he can survive it, I want to move him to my place."

"Factory Slide or Macunado Street?"

"Macunado. Nobody will come after him there."

"I'd rather move him out to my place in the country."

I didn't argue. There's no point with Belinda. She would go on doing things her way while empires collapsed around her. This time, though, she could be right. The Contague residence didn't have a live-in Loghyr but it was a fortress. The facilities and amenities were superior.

"It could be a long time before he's in shape to travel that far."

I have visited the Contague digs under a range of circumstances. A man could live comfortably there. He could also go in and never be seen again.

Belinda told me, "He won't go anywhere before he's ready." One pallid finger, tipped by a long carmine nail, tapped the windowsill.

I nodded.

A patch of something lay there, glistening. Something drying out. It reminded me of the trail left by a migrating slug.

I whispered, "Send me a pound of salt."

She might have been Belinda Contague but she was a girl. She didn't know about salt and slugs. Puzzled, she said, "All right."

The healer announced, "I've done what I can. He won't die. But he will be a long time getting back to normal. He may have been stabbed with cursed blades."

That smelled religious, which made no sense. Morley had enemies who would happily poke him full of holes if they could get away with it. They weren't religious wackos, nor were they so abidingly nasty as to go after his soul as well as his life.

Belinda concluded, "Must be a woman." No man was that vindictive.

"I don't know what's been going on in his life. I see him only when we stop in at the Grapevine after a show. You know my situation."

"I tried to talk to Tinnie. I wanted her to know what's happening."

I didn't like her tone.

"I was polite and respectful, Garrett. She was not."

I really didn't like her tone. Tinnie could get hurt. "She's really insecure. ."

"I just tried to explain the situation. She didn't endear herself. It wasn't about her."

Almost certainly my dearly beloved had failed to become more intimate with fierce pain primarily because she was my dearly beloved. Could she be made to understand that anymore?

Tinnie couldn't have changed that much. How could she? She was brilliant. She understood the real world. She had shared its harsh realities with me. She could figure things out. She had discovered, years ago, that Tinnie Tate was not the center, fulcrum, or favorite child of the universe.

I had this chill like it was midnight on the boulevard, and I was fixing to whistle my way past the graveyard.

I had an epiphany. "We're seeing symptoms, not the disease."

Belinda grunted, more interested in watching slime dry.

I stopped worrying about my troubles and checked my pal. His color and breathing had improved. He looked ready to wake up.

The round cultist went away. Belinda and I looked at each other. We wore big, goofy grins.

I went right on having trouble believing there could be anything but business between her and Morley.