“All right. Sorry. I took a second to worry. And to let Ted and Barate catch up. Go on, now. Open her up.”
She unbuttoned and flung the door wide—then put every ounce of her ninety-some pounds behind the shove she gave her victim.
He flipped over the porch rail.
“Damn, girl, I hope you didn’t break him.” I moved my man out more gently, then backed against the wall so Barate and Ted could evict their own.
“Why?” Penny asked. “They work for people who want to kill you. Who already killed Strafa.”
Barate shared her level of anger. He got a lot of muscle behind his toss.
Dr. Ted, though, wussed out. He still had trouble getting past that first-do-no-harm twaddle.
Then we were all tumbling over one another as we tried to get the door shut before something bigger than Vicious Min or the little blonde’s companion, wearing a head like a squid, got a tentacle in there among us.
Ted had no trouble going to work on that with his knife.
“What the hell was that?” the sweet young thing among us demanded. “That was one ugly fu . . . freak!” She was panting and shaking.
I was panting and shaking. Barate was panting and shaking. Ted was panting and shaking but had not gotten distracted from keeping eighteen inches of writhing severed tentacle pinned to the floor.
I said, “That thing had twenty arrows in it.” Though, really, most had been crossbow bolts. Whatever, they should have slowed it down.
The street had been seething with excited red tops, some of them Specials armed for military-style action.
I had some military tools of my own. I was tempted to break them out. If I did, though, Deal Relway would insist on knowing why I had them and where I’d gotten them, after the dust settled
Penny asked, “Would salt do any good?”
We once had an encounter with a tentacle-thing that had responded to salt like a snail or slug.
“I doubt it. That was a whole different kind of beast.”
Ted said, “You could experiment on this piece, though.”
That hadn’t stopped wriggling.
I said, “How about let’s get us some fresh victims?” I stepped to the doorway to the Dead Man’s room.
Shifting four bodies out hadn’t freed him up. He now had nothing with which to offer an explanation.
Penny guessed, “He’s busy holding off that thing out there.”
Almost certainly. The people still in the room had begun to stir. Then some heavy-duty thumping started up somewhere else in the house, maybe over where Vicious Min was supposed to be sleeping.
“Penny, run across and tell Moonblight . . .”
I didn’t have to finish. Mr. Tentacle had put the hoodoo on the kid, big-time. In seconds Moonblight was headed up the hallway looking grimly angry and as scary as Shadowslinger in a sour mood. She told me, “Stay out of the way, candy-ass!” Then, “My gods! I am going to blister that girl’s butt when I catch her.”
She knew what was out there and who to blame for its having come around. So. Here was more family squabble, of the sort where somebody was supposed to wind up hurt. Moonblight flung the door open and to hell with being fussed about what might be out there.
Tentacle-boy was right where we left him. But he-she-or-it wouldn’t be aggravating anyone else any time soon. Something had happened. Something that wasn’t all those bolts and arrows totaled up.
Something had carved off big chunks, including tentacles, legs, an arm, and a head. One big eye still had a dagger lodged in it, tip stuck solidly in the creature’s weird, cartilaginous skull.
Moonblight opined, “Well, hell, this isn’t so good.”
“Looks good to me,” I had to say. The contest in the street was breaking up. Bad boys had begun showing their heels with verve and enthusiasm. Tin whistles were putting the captured and fallen into restraints, ignoring wounds, taking no chances on dead guys only faking it.
There did seem to be an excessive number of fatalities. Red tops try to take their men alive. Prisoners can be passed along to the labor camps, where they pay their debts to society by contributing to public works. Plus, the camps pay prize money for breathing bodies.
79
Target and three battered friends came to the foot of my steps. Target’s eyes were up high enough to see Brother Tentacle’s remains. “Damn, that thing was ugly. Tough, too. We barely slowed it down.”
“How did this happen, then?”
“Some little old granny lady . . . Never seen nothing like it. Hell, I couldn’t see her at all, most of the time. There was just flashing steel and flying blood and screams in the street, like a bow wave headed here. Which ended with this mess. I only saw her clear for a couple seconds. She just stood there staring at your door. Then she sort of shimmered and went away again, leaving a couple more villains shorter by a head as she went. Very selective about who, too.”
“Sending a message.”
“She is for sure one seriously pissed-off old lady. I hope the Director don’t decide he’s got to hunt her down.”
“He wouldn’t be happy if he found her.” I looked to Moonblight for confirmation.
“Yes. Officer, do hope. Pray. That was the Black Orchid, come out of retirement.”
Target’s sudden pallor told us that he had been to that part of the world where the Black Orchid had made her name.
Moonblight continued. “She would be after Mariska. Thinking she might be here, but informed by your thing inside that she isn’t.”
So maybe Old Bones had gotten a little capacity freed up now. Or maybe he had let go of something else so he could deal with a deeper threat.
I said, “Folks, we need to get some more villains out of the house. Target. Buddy. I’ve got some more baddies for you. Some Scithe sent over. Some your boss sent. Some we caught on our own. They all have something to do with this creepiness. We don’t need them anymore. I’d be generally grateful, for minutes or more, if you could take them away.”
He sighed. “They’ll end up in the camps. Poor bastards. Most of them wouldn’t have gotten into this if they could’ve found any other work.”
A red top capable of sympathy and empathy? The wonders never cease. But, then, I was considering letting Niea skate. That poor bastard hadn’t done anything but his job.
Target told me, “Fine. I’ll take care of them. The Director will want to know what you got.”
“That was the deal.”
“In writing if you can. Memories are somewhat fallible.”
The Dead Man’s memory was perfect and it came with sounds and smells and kinesthetic cues. “I’ll ask Singe to create a report. But we’ve been out all day. It’ll take her a while just to catch up on her own stuff.”
He gave me a skeptical look. “Do what you have to do. But don’t waste time. Things are moving fast.”
He had that right. Developments were coming faster than we could make sense of anything.
Target and his boys clambered over the dead thing, which seemed severely deflated now and already smelled like calamari gone bad. The Specials avoided physical contact while easing past Moonblight. I said, “The ones we need to move out are in the room behind the door on the right. The ones cringing at the end of the hall still need to be processed.”
The newest arrivals were crowded back close to the kitchen door. Dean blocked that line of retreat. At some point Penny had dashed back to post herself on the first step of the stairs, cutting off any flight upward.
I glanced back outside.
Moonblight was on the porch trying to get the dagger out of the demon’s eye, if demon the critter was. Conversationally, she said, “We need to pick up this mess, throw it in a big pot, and cook it down so there’s no chance it’ll death-spawn.”
“Is it female?”
“I don’t know. How do you tell? But why take the chance?”
“I got to admit, I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“These things somet
imes squirt out all their eggs if they die suddenly. Thousands of eggs that can hatch in hours. The hatchlings look like whiskery little yellow grubs. They feed on the carcass till they can get at something alive. Only a few will manage, but the ones that do will make like botfly maggots.”
Botflies I knew. Botflies I remembered. Ugly, ugly stuff. The god who thought those up was one twisted . . .
I didn’t get the cooking part. I guess that would kill the larvae.
Some nobility types had gotten that treatment after they died in the field, so that their relics could be sent home for interment with family. Us ordinaries remained where we fell, of course. Unless we had friends who cared enough, and had time enough, to put us down deep enough so the scavengers couldn’t get us. Or, where there was wood to waste, they might burn us down to ashes and ghosts.
I wondered what the jackals and buzzards were doing now, in a time of famine. Waiting on each other to starve?
“Garrett? Are you there?” Target asked.
“I’m awake. I promise. What?”
“That’s Harmon Kolda in there. The poisoner. How did you catch him? We’ve been on the lookout for him for months.”
But not trying very hard, I didn’t say. Kolda ran a shop not far from Playmate’s stable. He had an apothecary sign outside with his name on it.
“The Director has always been interested in his client list.”
Harmon? Really? I couldn’t recall ever having heard Kolda called anything but Kolda, even by his wife.
“Sorry. He isn’t a prisoner. He’s a consultant. He’s helping treat a friend with cancer. Maybe he was in the poison racket one time. I keep hearing that. But he isn’t now. He makes good money as an apothecary.”
Target radiated a fog of skepticism.
“Anyway, the Guard’s writ doesn’t run to anything that happened before the Crown issued its charter. Right?”
“I never figured you for a barracks lawyer, Garrett. But I won’t argue.”
Yeah. If he really wanted Kolda, he could just wait outside. Kolda would head home eventually.
Maybe Target was really testing the Dead Man. He’d done a comedic double take when he got his first glimpse. Maybe he was trying to see if that lump of weird’s reputation was solid.
I looked over Target’s shoulder. And began to wonder if there was anything to the stories myself, in the sense that I couldn’t feel Old Bones at all.
I was concerned.
In modern Karentine that meant I was worried a whole lot.
We had worked through some grim times, off and on, but I couldn’t recall a time when there had been such an overwhelming demand, stressing his capacities and talents so severely.
He might be gone.
Gone in the sense that he was deeply asleep, recovering, not in the sense that he was gone gone, like into forever sleep.
I couldn’t see that coming up in my lifetime.
Target said, “If you insist I’ll just be too busy to notice the poisoner in the back.”
“Thank you, sir.” And cut it off there, with no sarcastic color commentary. “Maybe you’d better take the rest of these bums, too. The ones in the hall that I was going to hang on to. My partner is out of it now. We can’t do anything with them. He used himself up on that thing on the stoop.”
Which was the undecorated truth, as far as I knew, but Target was skeptical. I repeated Moonblight’s suggestion about cooking the thing down. He was skeptical some more, but less so. He had seen some stuff in his day, too. “I’ll see to it.” Still . . .
There seemed to be a fundamental assumption underlying Civil Guard culture: If Garrett is talking, he’s telling a tall one.
I know. They feel that way about all civilians. But it’s just not fair in my case. They’re wrong at least forty percent of the time. They should consider each statement on its own merits and in its own context.
Target eased past Moonblight so he could lean out and yell for more men, which made me real nervous. How did I make a big crowd go away, once it got in, without Old Bones to back me up?
Renewed thumping came from my old office. Something like an elephant gargling gravel bellowed a curse. It shook dust off the ceiling.
Singe leaned through the doorway to her office. “You want to do something about that?”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“Think!”
“Not part of my skill set. Tara Chayne? How about you? Anything you can do?”
“I’ll try. Give me a minute. I’m working on calming down. I still can’t believe Mariska did that! All our lives I’ve made allowances and excuses and covered for her. I’ve even bought people off for her. Then she goes and sends her favorite familiar after me. Her practically godsdamned diabolical supernatural husband thing, K’thool Hoo C’Thug himself! Damn her, I’ve had it! Sister or not, twin or not, I’m not going to pretend to be blind this time!”
Renewed, ever more vigorous thumping and cursing came from the room where Vicious Min was, apparently, trying to get onto her feet and back into the business of whatever her business was.
Still muttering, Moonblight headed off north to slay that particular giant.
80
So there I was. . . .
A lot of my stories start that way, and then beer or some lesser form of alcohol gets involved. I was hoping some of that might be involved here soon. I waved without enthusiasm as Target and his crew hauled the last bad boys away. The dead and wounded from the street scuffle had ended up aboard a big wagon that was a cell on wheels, where they were piled three deep.
Those healthy enough to shuffle under their own power had left already, tied together in a coffle.
Though the red tops took a few with them, nobody seemed to know what to do about the balance of the gray rats. The half-ass consensus was to turn them loose and let the rat community sort them out. Meaning a blind eye would turn to the moon while John Stretch did what he wanted to restore order, social norms, and tranquillity among the under-people.
As they sometimes do, my thoughts drifted. I was agitated because Old Bones did indeed appear to have gone into hibernation. That could last for weeks or even months.
This was not a good time.
It never is.
This time he had gone without passing along anything learned from Min, Hagekagome, or any of the gang folk we had rolled past him.
There was yet another outbreak of thumping and cursing in my old office, the verbal part more enthusiastic than the physical. I picked out a few words in no language I recognized but, doubtless, not the sort one used while having tea with one’s mother. Not my mother, anyway, even where she was likely dwelling now.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my mother plenty, I’ve just never had any illusions about her being a saint.
Well, she might have been to my goody-two-shoes baby brother.
Vicious Min had control of her faculties but not her flesh. The racket slowly declined.
The old homestead would need a thorough cleaning after this. How much could I pass off onto Penny?
She had scooted up front and had the door partway open, checking the street. Singe was helping her rubberneck, likely watching for her brother.
Dollar Dan lurked a few steps behind Singe, clearly nervous. It wasn’t clear why. I had no complaints. He had been a good man to have on the voyage.
Tara Chayne stepped out of my office-turned-infirmary. “That’s all I can do. It won’t last. You want her kept controlled, you need to get your partner back in action. Or convince Ted to do something.”
Ted sneered but did not dignify the suggestion with a response.
I said, “Based on experience I can say I don’t have a good feeling about that.”
“Then hand her over to the Specials, too. You won’t be able to manage her yourself.”
I started to say something, realized I had nothing to say. I broke precedent by actually not saying it.
Tara Chayne continued. “She’s mostly recovered. She has
an inhuman vitality. It’ll keep getting harder to make her sleep. Ted won’t help and I’m not moving in to handle her for you. I have other squid to fry.”
She wasted no innuendo on the move-in remark. It was time to go on. She had a sister who needed to be found and spanked. That sister was tagged. How far ahead had Moonblight been thinking? Had she thought that Moonslight might lead us somewhere interesting?
Had Target figured out that the tracer had migrated? Might he and his be launching their own hunt?
Moonblight thought they might be. She was getting antsy.
No way she wanted them getting to her sister first.
“I understand. Anything else you can do before we go?”
One eyebrow rose slightly in response to that “we.” She withheld comment otherwise. She did gesture toward the Dead Man’s room.
“Like I said, he could be out for months.”
“There is another resource in there.”
I didn’t understand. His Nibs was alone now, except for Playmate, Kolda, and Niea, all caught in the twilight between sleep and consciousness.
“The poisoner can render her pliable. Or, if not pliable, then weak and manageable. Or constantly unconscious.”
Maybe he could. I didn’t think it was reasonable to ask him to break any more laws on my behalf.
“Singe, are you expecting John Stretch?”
“I am. He will appear once he knows he can get here without being seen by the Guard. He will be interested in hearing what we know about the involvement of the grays.”
He would. “Too bad Old Bones is out of it. He probably had all the answers.”
Dollar Dan said, “Singe and I can give a few. We learned a lot that would not be obvious to a human observer.”
Singe nodded, then eyed Dan like she still wondered who this imposter might be.
I bit down on a grin.
You had to give the guy kudos for studly determination. He was willing to transform himself into a total rat man Poindexter if that was the price of gaining Singe’s favor.
His quest was poignantly, sadly foredoomed, but I was willing to pony up a pail of points for perseverance.