Faded Steel Heat (10 page)

“Manvil will have Genord make sure Tad’s things gets to your house in time. Please avoid the stables until after the affair.”

“I think I can resist the urge to visit them.”

Grinning, Gilbey suggested, “If you arrive early, you can critique our arrangements and watch the villains — make that guests — arrive.”

I pretended to be businesslike. “A reasonable plan, gentlemen.”

“Awk! We’ll be here.”

“We? I’ll sell your feathers first, you glorified duster.”

Weider chuckled. He said, “At least one of you ought to show up.”

“One of us will. Me. The one with half a brain.” I got up. I must have moved too fast. The floor got awfully unsteady suddenly.

Couldn’t have been that little dribble of beer.

20

“Will you quit stomping around?” The Goddamn Parrot kept getting more and more restless. I hoped that didn’t mean he wanted to exploit me the way pigeons traditionally do statues of forgotten generals. I’d seen enough animal by-product for one day.

Weider’s personal sitting room was in a corner of the front of his mansion, on what was called the second floor despite being only slightly above street level. The ground on which the mansion stood sloped. In back you could walk straight out but in front you climbed fifteen steps to reach the front door, then descended half a dozen back to street level. So the first floor lies below actual ground level almost everywhere. Only the rear of the house, including the kitchen, family dining room, and back stairs sees daily use. Most of it is reserved for entertainment.

Even the second floor mainly serves business and entertainment purposes. Weider rules his empire from there. The family lives higher still, on the third and fourth floors. Servants who live on the premises do so in nooks and crannies and under the eaves.

I didn’t envy them.

I was about to head down the grand staircase to the first floor when a remote scream stopped me. I glanced back. Gilbey stood in the doorway of Weider’s study, silhouetted. He shrugged, pointed upward.

I clomped downstairs muttering, “Tom is still with us.” I took several deep breaths crossing the pink-marble floor so when I got to the steps I could bound up to the front door with the spring of a misspent youth. The Goddamn Parrot never stopped prancing on my shoulder.

Max had three sons: Tad, Tom, and Ty. Tom and Ty made it back from the Cantard but Tom left his mind and soul behind.

Rich or poor, we have that in common. We’ve been to the Cantard. And we’ve lost somebody. And none of us who survived came home unchanged.

But the war is over. Karenta has triumphed. The Cantard’s fabulous mines now serve the sorcerers, who are our real masters. Karenta is the most powerful kingdom in the world. We should be proud.

This month, for the first time in three generations, the Crown conscripted no one.

We won. And because we did our world is falling apart.

Boy, am I glad we didn’t lose.

It seemed like a mile to the door. My heels clacked hollowly. Their sound echoed off the walls. Preparations were under way for the party but so far only to the extent that the hall had been stripped of clutter like carpets, furniture, portraits of imaginary forbears, old armor, crossed swords and pikes, and most anything that could become a weapon after the weather turned drunken.

There was no one watching the front door. The old man’s paranoia couldn’t run too deep. I clomped up and let myself out while making a mental note to suggest a less relaxed security posture.

I surveyed the neighborhood from the porch. Daylight was a ghost of its former gaudy self. “You got to dump, you’d better go do it now, you runt turkey.”

The bird squawked, said, “I wanted you outside so I could talk.”

The Dead Man. Of course. I knew we were headed this direction as soon as he started insisting that I take the little vulture everywhere. Not only would he use that ugly feather duster to spy on me, he meant to nag me like he was my mother.

I muttered, “Bird, you are doomed! Doomed!”

“What?”

“You’ve got me talking to myself. What do you want?”

“You need to come home. We have company only you can handle.”

“Damn.” What did that mean? I didn’t ask because he wouldn’t tell me. His excuse would be that the bird could talk only so much before he injured his throat, a limitation I’ve never witnessed when that vulture
 
—
or the Dead Man — had something to say that I didn’t want to hear. “Want to name names?”

“No. Don’t waste time.”

I’ll strangle them both. It’s got to take more effort to deny me than to say a name.

I took the direct route, which turned out to be a poor choice.

Grand Avenue from the Landing south to the Dream Quarter was choked with prohuman demonstrators. They were mostly younger than me. It didn’t seem possible that there could be so many, that they could all belong right here instead of scattered amongst a hundred towns and cities and a hundred thousand farms. But, of course, resentment of nonhumans is an ancient exercise. We had great and vicious wars in ages past. And today plenty of men older than me, secure in their trade or employment, are as intolerant as any youngster with no prospects.

I hit Grand where six hundred guys from The Call were marching back and forth practicing their manuals at arms using quarterstaves and wooden swords instead of pikes and sharp steel. Their apparel was moderately uniform. Their shields matched. Most wore light leather helmets. They were true believers in the highest cause and they had faced deadly enemies on the plains of war. This night would turn nasty if some genius on the Hill decided the army should disperse the demonstrators.

Any troops sent in faced demobilization themselves. An interesting complication.

I relaxed, awaited a chance to cross when I wouldn’t inconvenience any nut. You don’t want to irritate somebody who has several thousand of his best friends handy. Not unless you’re armed with the headbone of an ass.

A nice gap opened. Me and fifty other apolitical types decided to go for it.

“Hey! Garrett! Wait up!”

I knew that voice. Unfortunately. “Damn!” Maybe I could outrun her.

21

“Garrett!” That was my pal Winger doing the hollering. Winger is a big old country girl as tall as me, a good-looker, who abandoned her husband and kids to chase her fortune in the city. “Dammit! You stop right there, Garrett!”

“Wait,” the Goddamn Parrot squawked in my ear. I stopped. I was well trained. Several people nearby stopped, too, all startled by the bird’s having spoken.

A kid asked, “Does your bird really talk, Mister?” She was maybe five with blond hair in ringlets and the biggest innocent blue eyes ever invented. I wanted to make a date for about fifteen years but her dad looked like a guy who thought too much like a father. “Yes, he does. But it’s hard to get him started.”

“Awk! Pretty baby! Pretty girl!”

“Unless you’re someone special.”

The bird spotted Winger. “Awk! Holy hooters! Look at them gazoombies!” Nature had been generous to Winger.

I squeezed the bird’s beak before he got me assassinated.

“I love you, too, Mr. Big,” Winger said, hustling up. She ignored kid and dad completely. The father decided he wanted nothing to do with lowlifes like us. He took off across the street. Winger demanded, “Where do you think you’re going, Garrett?”

“I was seriously contemplating crossing the street while the goofballs don’t have it blocked, Hawkeye.”

“He was trying to get away from you, genius,” said a voice from behind me.

“Saucerhead!” I turned. Saucerhead Tharpe is a mountain of a man whose face has been rearranged several times too often. He grinned down at me. His teeth were stunted, black, and broken.

Between them Saucerhead and Winger have about enough sense to get out of the rain. After a lively debate obese with irrelevance. But you can count on their friendship. Well, all right, you can count on Saucerhead’s friendship. Winger’s tends to get slippery if money is involved.

“Hello, Winger my love. Hello, Saucerhead. How are you? I’m just fine myself, thank you. Nice to see you. I can’t chat right now. I’ve got to run.”

“We’ll run with you,” Winger told me.

“Why?”

“Because your sidekick isn’t athletic enough to do it hisself so he hired us. He figures you might need your diaper changed.”

“Yeah,” Saucerhead said. “He’s got a notion somebody might actually want to hurt you.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“I can’t imagine why, neither, Garrett,” Winger grumbled. “I mean, you only trample all over people’s feelings
 
—”

“Stuff it, Winger. Last time you had a feeling you beat it to a midwife to find out if it was gas or pregnancy.”

Winger grinned.

The man with the cute little girl increased his pace. He ignored her demands to hear the pretty bird talk again.

The Call guys started a chant and cheer combination that was both moving and chilling. Then they started marching in place. Their feet shook the pavement. They had a band, too, we discovered to our dismay.

I never liked military bands. I don’t get real excited about patriotic marches, either.

I paid attention and concentrated when I was in the Corps. I got real good at what I did. I became one of the best in a force made up of the elite of the elite. That helped me stay healthy. Never before then, then, or even now, has my soul suffered any compulsion to become an anonymous fraction of a brainless mass that has its thinking done for it by somebody who shouldn’t ought to be trusted to water horses.

Another chance to cross presented itself. I stepped out. Winger and Saucerhead stepped with me, one on either side. What was going on in the Dead Man’s minds?

Maybe he was finally drifting away for good, tarrying in a paranoid fantasy before letting go?

“This political crap is out of hand,” I told Saucerhead.

Tharpe is no thinker. He takes a while to form an opinion so he must have applied some serious mind work to the matter. “I don’t get it, Garrett. They’re overreacting. It’s like they’re screaming because TunFaire is full of people who live here.”

If Saucerhead has a prejudice, I’ve never noticed. Of course, he can develop one professionally if the pay is right. He’s a bone-breaker by trade, though he needs odd jobs to keep body and soul together.

“The other day you told me these times would be good for you.”

“Yeah. But times being good for me don’t mean it’s right, what’s happening. People are going crazy. It’s like some mad wizard cast a hate spell so everybody would act twice as stupid as usual.”

Saucerhead and Winger searched the shadows as we walked. I kept an eye on the darkness myself. I was edgy. Times had not been easy lately. I thought about penning an autobiography called
Trouble Follows Me
or maybe
Danger Is My Business.

Nothing happened except that we had to detour one small riot. Straggler rightsists had run into night folks who didn’t share their viewpoint. Most of the night crowd aren’t human and none have had sensitivity training so they respond to offensive behavior by breaking heads.

I don’t know why when you put three drunks together they decide they can conquer the world. If they choose to start with a troll, they get hurt. No matter how much they drink that troll is still impervious to just about everything but lichen infections.

Beer may not be the root cause of social problems at all, despite what the teetotallers claim. Old Man Weider may be producing the cure for our social ills. Suppose we let the morons get tanked and go looking for big trouble? Big trouble can eliminate them. Bingo. No more problem.

You can’t convince me that I’m obligated to save you from yourself. If you want to head for hell by way of smoking weed or opium, or by drinking, or by being dim enough to call a giant names to his face, go head. Enjoy the slide. I won’t get in your way.

Nope. I won’t hand you a bucket of grease, either. You’ve got to do it on your own.

22

“What’s the drill?” I asked as we turned into Macunado east of my place. I spoke for the Goddamn Parrot, in case the Dead Man needed to let me know about any special plans. Saucerhead and Winger thought I was asking them. They were unaware of the special relationship between the character with no mind and the one with way too many.

Winger said, “We walk you to your door and make sure you’re safely inside. You pay us.”

“Pay you? That’s going to come out of the Dead Man’s side of the business. I didn’t ask for baby-sitters.”

His Nibs didn’t rise to the bait. He didn’t want anybody to know he used the parrot.

Saucerhead said, “Will you look at them kids, Garrett? That’s disgusting.”

He meant several youths of preconscription age gathered on a street corner. They were baiting a covey of adolescent elf girls who were way out of their own neighborhood, not to mention out after dark. Their fathers would have whipped their bottoms purple had they witnessed what was happening. The boys were uncomplimentary in the extreme, their vocabularies heavily racist
 
—
although the clothing they affected was borrowed directly from elven styles. The girls giggled at the boys and dared them to do something. Anything. Because then they would make the boys look as stupid as they were talking.

“You want me to go tell them to mind their manners?” I asked.

“Huh?” Tharpe responded, baffled. “Manners? What’re you talking about, Garrett?”

“No. What’re
you
talking about? If not their behavior?”

“Their hair, man!” Tharpe eyed me like he wondered if I was going blind. “Look at their hair.”

“They’ve got a lot of it.” Most of them had it up and artificially curled and it looked like hell, but so what? It was obvious already that they didn’t mind being the butt of mockery.

Saucerhead never outgrew his military haircut. He grumbled, “What kind of parents would let their kids go around looking like that? You want to know why Karenta is going to hell...”