Sweet Silver Blues

6

He's called the Dead Man because they killed him four hundred years ago. But he is neither dead nor a man. He is a Loghyr, and they don't die just because somebody sticks a bunch of knives into them. Their bodies go through the motions—cooling out, rigor mortis, lividity—but they do not corrupt. Not at any rate mere humans can detect. Loghyr bones have been found in the ruins on Khatar Island; they are very similar to a human's when they are dry.

"Hey, Old Bones. Don't look like the diet is working." The Dead Man is four hundred fifty pounds of mean, a little ragged around the edges, where the moths and mice and ants have gotten to him. He was parked in a chair in a dark room in a house that pretended to be both abandoned and haunted. He smelled. The corruption process is slow, but it goes on. "You need a bath, too."

A psychic chill set me shivering. He was sleeping. He isn't easy to get along with at his best, and he's at his worst when newly awakened.

I am not sleeping. I am meditating.

The thoughts hammered at my brain.

"Guess it's all a matter of perspective."

The psychic chill became physical. My breath clouded and my shoe buckles frosted over. I hurried with a little propitiations that are necessary when dealing with the Dead Man. The freshly cut flowers went into the big crystal bowl on the filthy old table before him. Then I lit candles. His sense of humor insists there be thirteen of them, all black, burning while he is in consultation.

To my knowledge he is the only Loghyr ever to allow his genius to be commercialized.

He does not need the candlelight to see visitors or flowers. But he likes to pretend that he does.

Aha! I see you now. Garrett. You pestilence. Can't you leave me alone? Every other day you're in here, worse than the moths and mice.

"It's been five months, Chuckles. And from the looks of this place you've been meditating the whole time."

A mouse that had been hiding beneath his oversized chair made a break for it. The Dead Man snatched it with his mind and sent it flying out of the house. Moths exploded away from him. He was incapable of doing malicious harm to bugs, who wanted to eat him, but could make life unholy hell for people with the effrontery to ask him to work.

"You have to work sometime," I told him. "Even a dead man has to pay the rent. And you need somebody to give you a bath and clean the place up. Not to mention getting the vermin out again."

A big, shiny black spider crawled out of one piglike nostril on the end of his ten-inch trunk. It did not like my looks. It ducked back inside.

Cheap flowers.

They were not. I had given him absolutely no legitimate cause for complaint. He couldn't banish me because he didn't want to work. I knew the state of his finances. His landlord had come to me about his last month's rent.

Must not be much of a client you have, Garrett. You sneaking around after cheating wives again?

"You know better." I was out of all that, thanks to him.

How much?

"You owe me for a month's rent already."

You have the smug, content look of a man whose expenses have been guaranteed.

"So?"

How much can you soak your client before he squawks?

"I don't know."

Enough, I think, the way you look. Which is like a man who has a good fix on the pot at the end of the rainbow. Start reading.

"What?"

Stop playing the idiot, Garrett. You're too old. You dragged that crate of stuff here so you could bore me. That is the worst of being dead, Garrett. It is damned boring. You cannot do anything.

"Loghyr don't do anything when they're alive."

Read, Garrett. Your welcome is wearing thin.

I won. Sort of. He listened while I gave him every word, showed him every map. A smooth, professional report. I stumbled only twice, once over the name Kayean, once when he set a squeaking mouse whizzing playfully around my head. It took a couple of hours and I got very dry. But I'd prepared for that, having been through it before.

As I downed a long draft of beer, my head rang to, Very thorough. As far as it goes. What did you leave out?

"Nothing. You got the whole show."

You are lying, Garrett. And not very convincingly. Though perhaps you are lying more to yourself than to me. You tripped on the woman's name. It has meaning to you.

Well, if you will lie to your best friend, you will lie to yourself. The Dead Man doesn't tell any tales. "It has meaning."

Continue.

"I knew a Kayean Kronk when I was in the Cantard. Her father was one of the Syndics of Port Fell. I was nineteen when I met her. She was seventeen. I fell hard. I thought she did too. But the campaign in the islands came up and I only got to see her maybe two days a month because we spent most of our time at sea. After about six months of that she started getting cool. Then I came in and there was a very kind letter asking me not to come see her, she was in love, the usual sort of thing. I never saw her again. I heard she was going with a cavalryman, and her father disliked him even more than he had disliked me. That was the last I heard of her till today.

"I had a rocky few years after that. It hit me pretty hard."

End of confession.

A long silence.

Your friend never mentioned that woman's name?

"He never mentioned a woman."

An odd coincidence, and a long one, but not impossible. It would be illuminating to know if he was aware of the identity of the woman's previous lover. How did you meet?

"We met in a tavern where veterans hung out. We had liked one another. Not one detail I could recall implied that he had knowledge of me through a third party. I don't think he was the kind of guy who could stay around somebody who had been his lover's lover. I'd bet his whole fortune that he didn't realize that I was the Marine she'd been seeing."

You may be betting it. You realize that the amount of money involved is going to have a lot of people interested in this business?

"That's why I came to you. I need your advice."

My main advice you would ignore.

"What's that?"

Leave it alone. Stick with the brewery work. This could get you killed. Especially on the Cantard end. Some very dangerous people have to be involved there, if only peripherally.

"How so?"

Who did the woman marry? the Dead Man countered.

"I don't know. Why? Do you think it's important?"

I will hazard to opine that it may become the crux of the affair.

"Why?"

It is evident from the woman's letters that she has access to information very restricted in nature and extremely dangerous to possess. She passed along data not only on the present movements and future plans of your armies, but on those of the Venageti as well. The implication is that she is in a unique position. Among you humans, females are not permitted to assume the responsibilities of such a position as a career. Thus, the further implication that she is mated to a man in such a position.

The Dead Man's mind speech has all the nuance of verbal communication—once you learn to do without gestures and facial expressions. He was crowing. "I could have figured that out soon enough."

About the time someone cut your throat. You count upon your ability to bluff or battle your way through obstacles, rather than thinking your way around them. It is a failing common to your race. All of you seem to believe that exercising your minds is shameful or painful, and prefer instead to snatch up a sword at the first hint of...

He was off on his favorite crusade. Soon he would begin the paeans to the infinite superiority of Loghyr reasoning and logic and wisdom. I shut him out.

That can be done if he is distracted by musing upon his own magnificence, if you're subtle and don't draw attention to what you're doing. I hid behind my beer and counted silently. Having heard it all before, I knew how long he needed to get it out of his system.

Garrett!

So I miscalculated by a few seconds. He probably cheated. He knew me pretty well, too. But he was abnormally mellow. He employed none of his usual childish devices. Maybe I had given him enough to crack the boredom of being dead.

"Yes?"

Pay attention. I asked if you are determined to go ahead with this.

"I'm not sure."

Your body calls your mouth a liar. I have this advice for you, inasmuch as you mean to go ahead despite all reason. Do not go this one alone. And do not permit emotion to get in the way of your usually strong instinct for your own best interest. Whatever else this woman may be or may have been, she is not the girl you loved when she was seventeen. No more are you that callow Marine of nineteen. If ever, for a minute, you allow yourself to believe that those days can be restored, you are lost. They are dead. Take it from an expert on being dead. There is no way to get your health back. You live on memories of what was and fancies about what might have been. Both can be deadly to the man who loses sight of the demarcation between them and reality.

"End of speech?"

End of speech. Were you listening?

"I was listening."

Did you hear me?

"I heard."

It is well. You are a pestilence upon my waning centuries, Garrett, but you keep me amused. I do not want to lose you yet. Be careful in the Cantard. You will not have me there to lift you out of the consequences of your folly. It grates, but I fear I would miss you, insolence, disobedience, and all.

Which was about the nicest thing he ever said to me. I had to get out before we started getting maudlin.

I made a beer run before going back to give him his bath and his place a bit of cleanup.