Wicked Bronze Ambition

35

The shop was one of those places with airs and a clever name, Flubber Ducky. Which I didn’t get. Maybe no one else did, either, because I didn’t get an answer when I asked around. I never got to ask anyone inside. I came close to getting no chance to open my yap at all. Belinda wanted me to stay in the background and keep quiet. She didn’t want me asking questions that could be interpreted only as part of a quest to unearth the Operators.

There was more to her thinking, but she wasn’t inclined to share it.

With little more than an eyeblink and a wave of her fingers, she conjured the Contague family coach and half a dozen very large, hard men who would drive, ride the footmen’s running boards, or trot along ahead or behind on horseback. That she had only six escorts today told me that peace reigned in the underworld-for the moment.

Belinda faced more challenges than her father ever had simply because she was a woman. So many ambitious villains just could not believe that she was as ferocious and crazy as she really was.

We reached the shop Jon Salvation had mentioned. It really was called Flubber Ducky. It had a sign outside saying so. Amazing. Belinda’s thugs isolated it without being given specific instructions, establishing a unidirectional customer flow. There were no complaints. These were the kinds of guys who got their way just by standing around looking grim.

There were only a few customers inside, all on the costumers’ side. Belinda isolated the elder of two men working props. He fit Jon Salvation’s description of the clerk who had dealt with the men who had wanted bronze swords. She moved in close enough for her hot breath and buxom proximity to be intimidating. “Two men came here looking for bronze swords. Who were they?”

The clerk did that dumb-goldfish-tasting-the-water thing while seeing nothing but Belinda’s fierce red lips and strange blue eyes, all within licking distance. Could dread hetero possibly be catching?

Belinda used a soft, gentle, terrifying voice to suggest, “Talk to me while you still can.”

The clerk chewed on the air. A breeder storm had fallen on him out of a cloudless sky. He didn’t understand, except that this might be the start of something bad.

“Talk to me,” Belinda urged in her deadly mommy voice. “Who were they?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. They never said.”

I winced. Belinda’s ego was not yet ready for “ma’am.” Like Lady Tara Chayne Machtkess, she might never be ready.

She said, “They bought stuff.”

“Yes, ma’am. Robes. Other ceremonial-style stuff. Best quality.”

“Which will have to be delivered somewhere.”

“No, ma’am.” He gulped some more air. “They said they would pick everything up.”

“When?”

“A week from yesterday. They paid for priority service.”

“Did they say who would do the picking?”

“They said they would come themselves.”

That didn’t sound smart.

Maybe they weren’t villains. Or maybe they were sure that nobody would be looking for them.

The tournament thing was so completely anachronistic, why not?

Belinda kept pressing but didn’t get much more, other than to extract a copy of the order that the old men had placed, after which she wheedled the old clerk into telling her where the old men went to get their bronze weapons made.

“Normally we would commission the blades ourselves, passing them on at a big markup. Those men didn’t seem concerned about costs, but they were creepy. Scary creepy. I wanted them out of the shop. So I sent them to the smithy we use for specialty stuff. I sent a runner to tell Trivias to set the price high and kick back a sucker’s fee to Flubber Ducky.”

Belinda gave me a warning look. I was getting restless and was making inarticulate noises indicating that I had something to say. When she could take it no more, she snapped, “What?”

“We need to find a way to have this fellow visit my house.”

Belinda’s frustration faded. “Of course. That makes perfect sense. I should’ve thought of that. Elwood.” She turned to the largest of her large men. “Load our witness in the coach and take him to Mr. Garrett’s home in Macunado Street. Wait for him, then bring him back when he’s done visiting.”

“No, you don’t! Oh no, you don’t!” A skinny little guy, barely five feet tall, mostly bald but with hair six inches long where he had any hair at all, bustled in from the other side of the shop. He carried what looked like a naval belaying pin in a left hand that lacked its two outermost fingers. His eyes were a washed-out, watery blue, but they were fierce and fearless.

His sojourn in the Cantard was a long time gone. He was out of practice at the killer’s trade. He had lived in the tailor’s world since coming home. But he had not lost his courage, nor had he gained a grip on reality.

Nobody who had that grip would tie into Belinda’s crew the way he tried.

He did have the advantage of surprise. Briefly.

Belinda’s heavyweights broke some stuff, not including the tailor but that only because their boss insisted that she just get his attention. She examined price tags attached to the damaged goods. “Those were just display pieces, right?” She slipped a gold angel into the left-side pocket of Mr. Feisty’s blouse. “Take this one, too, Elwood. Leon, help wrangle. The rest of us will visit the man who is going to make those swords.”

Elwood and Leon, gently for thugs, showed the craftsmen to their transport. The rest of us gathered on the street, to debate the best way to get where we wanted to go-except for one normal-size but scarred and remarkably ugly character called Bones who stayed to explain to the staff that the damage they were about to put right could as easily happen to people who could not overcome a compulsion to whine to the tin whistles.

It had been said that Bones had gone for a run through the Forest of Ugly blindfolded on a moonless night and had banged into every tree before he got to the other side. With the scars added he was one intimidating character. It was not often that he was forced to act.

There was a tin whistle in the street, half a block west of Flubber Ducky, deftly ignorant of any miscreantcy that might be happening within rock-throwing distance of the Chodo family coach.