Cruel Zinc Melodies gp-12

by Glen Cook

  ‘‘Let me take that back, Garrett. I thought of something it’s more like than wind chime music. Only I don’t know what you call it. One of those music things where you hit little pieces of metal, all different sizes, with little wooden hammers.’’

  ‘‘Chimes,’’ I said.

  ‘‘That’s the kind that hang off a rail. Yeah. But I mean the kind where they’re laid out on a little table.’’

  I could picture what he meant. Only place I ever saw one was in the orchestra pit of one of the World’s competitors. ‘‘I don’t know, either. But I know what you mean.’’

  ‘‘Good. Because the music is like from a band of those, all with zinc chimes.’’

  ‘‘If the racket is that bad, how come you think it’s music?’’

  ‘‘You have to hear it to get it.’’

  ‘‘If I must, I must.’’

  54

  Saucerhead and Rockpile worked well together. The guardhouse went up quickly. Saucerhead’s henchmen glowed with anticipation. I reminded Tharpe that the job was more than just hanging out in a warm place.

  His guys were on the job, though. Men called Sparrow and Figgie Joe Crabb brought in a prowler they said was up to no good around back of the World. He wasn’t big. He wasn’t well dressed. He stank. Not as much as Lurking Felhske, but enough to stand out in a city where most people are allergic to soap. He could’ve stood to eat a meal, too. His limbs were like spider legs. He needed to stand straighter, too. His hair was a tangled mess of greasy strings. He wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. He knew who I was. He was hoping I wouldn’t remember him.

  Life had been one disappointment after another. His luck wouldn’t change today.

  ‘‘Snoots Gitto. It’s been a while. Little out of your normal range, aren’t you? What’s your story?’’

  Snoots mumbled something about he was looking for a job. That changed under the press of a battery of sneers. My companions didn’t know Snoots but they knew the breed.

  Snoots then whined about trying to find something he could sell so he could buy something to eat. Snoots has a talent. He can mumble and whine at the same time.

  He might be telling the truth. If information was what he wanted to find.

  I told Saucerhead, ‘‘Let’s don’t start pounding him yet. Snoots is more than he seems.’’

  ‘‘Seems like a bum to me.’’

  ‘‘Exactly. But he’s really a spy for Marengo North English and that crowd.’’

  Tharpe, Sparrow, Crabb, and a couple others considered Snoots. And didn’t believe me.

  ‘‘Behold the master race,’’ I told them. Then, ‘‘Snoots, you’ve stumbled into the gooey poo. Only one way out. You tell the truth.’’

  Snoots stared at the pavements and made whiny noises. They didn’t add up to words.

  ‘‘What’re you doing here? I’m listening. If you deal off the top of the deck, I won’t give you to Rockpile, there. You do mess with me, I’ll have these guys break stuff and pull bits off till you do convince me. Then I’ll turn you over to Rockpile anyway. He can drag you over to the Al-Khar. Where, I’m pretty sure, your name is still on the list of people Director Relway wants to meet bad enough to pay a finder’s fee for an introduction.’’

  Snoots became cooperation itself. If Cooperation were a goddess, Snoots would be a kitten purring in her lap and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. He said, ‘‘There was a rumor that some nonhuman labor might be about to be used around here.’’ He cast a worried glance at Rockpile.

  ‘‘A rumor? Who did you hear it from?’’

  Snoots Gitto wasn’t a complete craven. But he was a realist and a pragmatist. He knew he would give up everything. Given time. Time was of no value to him. So he wasn’t principled enough to make us hurt him for a while before he accepted the inevitable.

  ‘‘Couple of the tradesmen on this project. We have a party place over yonder a couple blocks. They passed the word. Sounded like they were just pissed off at their foreman. But I wasn’t doing nothing. So the sector chairman sent me to check it out. I was trying to find the snitches when these guys started hassling me.’’

  ‘‘And what snitches were you looking for?’’

  Snoots dragged his feet a while. Naming names would make him unpopular.

  He figured six seconds was an honorable effort. ‘‘Myndra Merkel and Bambi Fardanse.’’

  ‘‘Bambi?’’ Saucerhead gasped. ‘‘Really? You’re serious?’’ I beckoned. ‘‘Luther.’’ The foreman had been hanging around, trying to catch the conversation. I told him, ‘‘Bambi Fardanse and Myndra Merkel. Tell them to pick up their tools and go home. They don’t work here anymore.’’

  That set him off. ‘‘Who the fuck do you think you are? You don’t fire people. They don’t work for you. They work for— Yah!’’

  The shriek started when Saucerhead laid hands on. Saucerhead has a knack for wringing inarticulate noises out of uncooperative people.

  ‘‘That should do it. I think we have his attention. Luther. Those men are gone. See to it. Snoots, tell your boss to mind his own business. Your bunch messed with Max Weider once before. He went easy because he had friends involved. That won’t happen again. Understand? Considering the current political climate?’’

  That weather was fickle but the people in charge, and, notably, the master of the secret police, enjoyed an antagonistic attitude toward the human rights movement. There were those—notably, the head of the secret police—who were overjoyed whenever evidence of rightsist misbehavior fell into their laps.

  Snoots bobbed his head. He made inarticulate, whining sounds. I spun him around, slapped him on the seat of the pants. ‘‘Off you go. And I hope I don’t see you again in this life.’’

  ‘‘You maybe shouldn’t’ve said that, Garrett,’’ Tharpe opined a moment later. ‘‘Now you got him thinking about options he never saw before.’’

  ‘‘He won’t think too hard. Look over there. A man Snoots is sure to recognize. And recall that we have a special relationship.’’

  Morley Dotes, Puddle, Sarge, and somebody I didn’t know were ambling along the far side of the street. Paying the World no heed. Morley and the stranger were engaged in an animated conversation. Sarge and Puddle seemed bored.

  I muttered, ‘‘That son of a bitch is looking for a place to put a restaurant.’’

  ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘Huh? Oh. Just being startled by seeing somebody actually take my advice.’’

  ‘‘Is that unusual?’’

  ‘‘It is in this case.’’

  Puddle noticing me staring. He said something. Morley looked over, waved, showed me a rack of needle teeth, then went on about his business.

  Nearer to hand, Rockpile’s crew started roofing the guardhouse.

  55

  The thing below must have burped. Or something. We all felt the psychic wave. I gasped. Everyone made some kind of noise.

  Workmen poured out of the World like rats fleeing fire. A horde of a dozen, at least. Across the way, Morley and his crew stopped to watch.

  Flying lizards flapped up off the roof. They wobbled away clumsily, hurling indignant shrieks behind. Bugs burst out of hiding and raced off in every direction. There were only a few but they were all the biggest I’d seen yet.

  Saucerhead murmured, ‘‘Damn, I’m glad they didn’t make no spiders! I hate spiders.’’

  I looked around nervously. When somebody says something like that it’s certain I’ll be up to my hips in tarantulas the size of sled dogs within minutes.

  No spiders materialized. Saucerhead Tharpe was at peace with the gods.

  They love some of us more than others. They are quite mad. And their favoritism is completely unreasonable.

  The psychic wave passed.

  Several workmen refused to go back inside. I told the foreman, ‘‘They don’t go, Luther, it’s a voluntary quit.’’

  I noted that those of Rockpile’s crew who were most obviously breeds had shown
the least reaction to the psychic shock. A few hadn’t responded at all.

  Luther consulted his troops. They were sullen and rebellious. I joined the group. Saucerhead followed. Just in case. I said, ‘‘Before you guys make a decision that could shape the rest of your lives, answer me this. Have any of you gotten hurt by what’s going on in there? You? You? You? No? And you don’t know anyone who got hurt, either. Do you? So what it adds up to is, you’re running away from your own imaginations. Your own guilty consciences. Eh?’’

  Every word I spoke was true. Every man listening knew it.

  Fear squeezed them, even so.

  Part of the human pattern predisposes us to bend the knee to a supernatural power, however improbable. Or even ridiculous, to an outsider or atheist.

  ‘‘So what will it be? Go looking for work? Or suck it up and carry on? I’ll be working on making the spooky stuff stop.’’

  It was easy to pick out the single guys. They were the ones who thought twice before clenching their jaws and heading back to work.

  56

  ‘‘Here comes Winger,’’ Tharpe told me.

  Conditioned by an age of disappointments involving that woman, I turned, expecting a whole new set of problems.

  Well . . .

  Winger had a family of dwarves in tow. Mom and Pop, adolescent son and prepubescent daughter. All readable only because they’d all gone native.

  In the normal scheme sexing a dwarf is something only a dwarf can manage without getting closer than I want to imagine. Male and female, they come with immense crops of hair, arsenals sure to include at least one huge ax and an amazing variety of supplemental cutlery, and a lot of attitude. In general, dress consists of a chain-mail shirt not tucked in, an iron hat, and a leather apron something like a kilt. The more pockets on the apron, the higher the status of the dwarf.

  Got to be a joke in there somewhere.

  The mom in this crew wore a paisley apron that started life as a carpet. Her helmet was a feminine little pillbox in blackened steel, without horns or other appurtenance. Dad wore a stylish pullover made from burlap bags, hiding most of his mail.

  The younger dwarves, almost human in apparel, seemed painfully embarrassed to be seen in the company of parents. Definitely a custom borrowed from humans.

  Winger boomed, ‘‘This here is Garrett. Runs things at this end. Garrett, this is Rindt Grinblatt.’’

  Papa Dwarf offered the slightest of bows. It was the kind dwarves deploy when confronted by lesser beings in superior numbers.

  ‘‘Good to meet you,’’ I lied. And turned to Winger for an explanation.

  ‘‘The Dead Man hired them to poke around under that abandoned house. They have all the information they need.’’

  The little one whined, ‘‘Daddy made me go in the house with the creepy thing! It messed around inside my head.’’

  Rindt Grinblatt—a name either made up or adopted because it wasn’t traditional dwarfish—admitted it. ‘‘I wasn’t gonna go in dere wit’ dat t’ing. I don’t need my mind swept. Mindie don’t got no secrets to give away.’’

  Fathers. You got to love them.

  Generally, dwarves are inscrutable. Mindie was not. Her expression said her father didn’t have a clue what he was blathering about.

  Winger told me, ‘‘The Dead Man said to tell you he put a map of the underground into her head.’’

  Dwarves being folks who live in caves and tunnels in the wild, this bunch should have no trouble if the map they’d gotten was the one Old Bones based on my recollections of those cellars.

  ‘‘My partner told you what he wanted done?’’ Since this was all a surprise to me.

  ‘‘We got it,’’ Rindt Grinblatt grumbled.

  ‘‘The Dead Man told me. I explained,’’ Winger said. ‘‘In case Mindie gets distracted.’’

  Rindt grumbled, ‘‘You just show us where the house is.’’

  Grinblatt was not in a bad temper. He was being upbeat. For a dwarf. He had a paying job.

  I looked to Winger for further illumination. She told me, ‘‘You take them to the abandoned house. And turn them loose.’’

  ‘‘Follow me,’’ I grumbled, cheerful as an employed dwarf. Snowflakes had begun to swirl. I wasn’t looking forward to manning a shovel. I wondered if Max and Gilbey would notice the charge if I hired a stand-in shoveler.

  I led. Grinblatts followed, none with any enthusiasm. They were working only in response to the supreme motivator, hunger.

  Very upbeat. For dwarves.

  Winger brought up the rear.

  We hadn’t gone half a block before a brace of flying thunder lizards wheeled through the random snowflakes overhead, hitting something on the roof of the World. The lead flyer flapped back up with a pair of struggling beetles, one neatly mounted atop the other. The bottom bug fell. It crunched into the cobblestones a dozen yards away, the fall instantly fatal.

  The dwarves surrounded the beetle. Its limbs continued to twitch. Rindt Grinblatt said, ‘‘I didn’t believe it. But dere it is. You cain’t argue wit’ dat.’’

  I explained, ‘‘They’re big but not dangerous. They haven’t—’’

  ‘‘I know dat. We’re supposed ta find out where dey’re comin’ from. An’ git rid a’ any a’ dem we runs inta.’’

  Looking at those four, with all the mail and armament, I decided the Dead Man had been very clever indeed. Dwarves were perfect exterminators for these vermin. They were used to tight places, underground. And they were unlikely to be hurt by the bugs. The darkness, smells, and spells wouldn’t bother them, either.

  I visited Dwarf Fort once, a long time ago, warrens where dwarves who won’t acculturate live once they come to the big city. The perfume of countless never-washed dwarf bodies, in tight quarters, while potent enough to water the eyes of a maggot, go unremarked by the denizens of the place.

  ‘‘Here we are,’’ I said when we arrived. The abandoned house looked bleaker than ever. ‘‘I can’t tell you much. I went in there once myself but I didn’t get very far. Be careful on the stairs.’’

  Grinblatt rumbled, ‘‘We’ll let you know what we find.’’ He and his tribe had gone native, but he wasn’t going to let some mere human get too friendly.

  ‘‘I’ll be back at the World when you want me.’’

  Clan Grinblatt unlimbered axes and tromped up the shaky steps. They vanished into the abandoned house.

  Winger and I headed for the theater. I observed, ‘‘Joyful bunch.’’

  She responded with a Grinblatt grunt, then asked, ‘‘You got any idea what Pilsuds is up to?’’

  ‘‘Who?’’ It took a moment. ‘‘Oh. The Remora. I forgot that was his real name. No. I don’t.’’ I dared not tell her that the Dead Man was more interested in enlisting Jon Salvation than her.

  ‘‘Why can’t you just call him by the name that he wants, Garrett?’’

  ‘‘Because Jon Salvation is ridiculous. And you just called him Pilsuds.’’

  Winger is no addict of consistency. She ignored me. ‘‘Jon Salvation is gonna be famous. He already finished his second play. He read it to me. It’s really good.’’

  Winger is no fan of the arts. Nor has ever been. Unless she can find someone willing to buy it, off the books.

  She said, ‘‘The little shit drives me nuts when he’s around. He’s so damned clingy. And needy. And horny. But now that he hasn’t been underfoot for a few hours, I’m missing him.’’

  She’d be nervous about the constituents of the crowd who meant to perform Jon Salvation’s plays. Alyx. Bobbi. Lindy. Cassie Doap, who had yet to show her primo self. Even Heather Soames. Every one definitely worth considering a threat.

  I was nervous about the redhead of the set. Though not that a wannabe playwright would carry her off. I was afraid that someday she’d go away because old Garrett couldn’t help going right on being Garrett.

  There have been rare moments when I haven’t been the most lovable guy roaming these mean streets.<
br />
  57

  A train of wagons had appeared outside the World. Saucerhead was directing traffic, moving them on to park farther along once they unloaded.

  Curious bystanders had begun to turn out. We had giant bugs, flying thunder lizards, and now, ratpeople by the wagonload. That’s entertainment.

  Morley and his crew continued working rentable buildings nearby.

  The wagons spilled ratmen and cages full of cranky rats. More than ever before. I spotted John Stretch. He must have been preparing for the callback for days. I headed his way. ‘‘Thought you’d had enough of this place.’’

  ‘‘I do not like it, Mr. Garrett. It is a bad place. But it could make me rich.’’

  ‘‘And me poor. The Dead Man hired you?’’

  ‘‘Yes. He wants one more offensive against the bugs from down below.’’

  ‘‘They’re so big now, your best rats may not be able to hold their own.’’

  ‘‘This could be the last time this approach is possible. Rats are not smart. They are cunning. But they do learn. And they pass their learning along. By the time today’s game is played out, it may be impossible to gather any significant number of feral rats willing to be used here.’’

  ‘‘Ratpeople could take over.’’

  ‘‘You are mad.’’

  ‘‘It’s completely safe. Hell, there’s a family of dwarves down there poking around right now.’’

  ‘‘There are ghosts.’’

  ‘‘That only bother humans.’’

  ‘‘Till now.’’

  John Stretch was well on into an extended graphic description of what I could do with my idea about sending ratmen down when an unexpected visitor interrupted.

  ‘‘Rocky? Hey!’’ It was the midget troll who made deliveries for a living. ‘‘What’re you up to?’’

  Rocky is a blazing fast talker. For a troll. He’s had too much exposure to human beings. It took him only ten seconds to get going on an answer. ‘‘It is my day off. Playmate told me you might could use some help. I could use a little extra money.’’