by Glen Cook
Maybe Colonel Block could get me a big fat medal for having saved Karenta from the foreign sorcerers and sorceresses. Maybe the flying pigs would start evicting the pigeons from their traditional roosts. Which sure would leave a mess around all those dead and incompetent generals posing outside the Chancery.
The common wisdom among former grunts is that competent generals wouldn’t have screwed up so bad they got themselves killed and therefore there wouldn’t have been any need for a memorial.
Soldiers are a cynical bunch.
In the process of exploring the interior of the discus I discovered Cypres Prose installed in a padded box behind a door that locked from the outside. The little horizontal closet was soundproof. It was on a floor above the one with the marvelous lights and the wonderful view.
The upper level seemed to constitute of crew quarters and such, if you went over it just guessing.
My years in the Corps, with its ancient and traditional naval associations, clicked in at last. This thing had to be some kind of aerial ship or boat. With a crew. With decks and bulkheads and hatches instead of floors and walls and doors. With heads instead of toilets and galleys instead of kitchens — and all that special navy talk us Marines always resented.
The silver elves must have been trying to teach Kip something, stashing him in a padded box. But they hadn’t been harsh enough. Their rewards and punishments must have been too subtle. The boy began to complain the second the door opened, never once going for a “Good to see you again,” or, “Thanks for coming to find me, Garrett.” That being the case I shut him back in while I went on to explore the rest of the aerial ship.
After a while I reopened the hatch confining Kip. “Where can I find Lastyr and Noodiss?”
Bitch, bitch, piss, and moan.
“All right. Your call.” I shut the hatch.
I went back outside “Hey, Marsha, did you happen to look for Dojango? I’m pretty sure they dragged him into one of those lead eggs.”
In the excitement we’d forgotten the little brother.
Marsha went over to the fallen egg and yelled in the doorway. He didn’t get a response. For a moment he and I both stared up the hill along the path taken by the berserk egg. Then Marsha went and yelled into the dented egg. That didn’t do any good either.
“I’d better look,” I said. “Chances are they wouldn’t have left him in any condition where he could do some mischief.” These silver elves were highly weird but I doubted that they were highly stupid.
I was right. I found Dojango in the dented ship, as unconscious as Singe and Playmate and Saucerhead Tharpe. “This is not good,” I kept muttering to myself. Until my superior intellect finally seized the day.
I went up into the vineyards and asked around until I found a somberly clad, gloomily serious young man willing to abandon his post for a fee. I gave him messages to deliver to the Dead Man, to Morley Dotes, and to Colonel Block. In that order. I gave him half of his handsome messenger’s stipend before he departed, giving him to understand that receipt of the balance was contingent upon his getting the job done right. He nodded a lot. All his mates seemed to think his going to the city was a huge joke.
Then I just felt like I could lie back and take it easy until reinforcements arrived. Taking a few minutes every hour to go see if Kip had started to catch on yet.
That boy was slow. After a while he mentioned hunger. “That right there’s you one more motive for turning cooperative, I’d say. Whew! It’s really starting to get ripe in there, too. Guess those good old silver boys let you out when you had to go.” He refused to understand that right away, too.
Back outside, I asked, “How is Doris looking, Marsha?” I’d been rooting for a swift recovery. Making small talk with the healthy brother had worn thin in a hurry. Once we’d used up business and gossip all Marsha could talk about was the shortage of suitable females within his size range.
“An’ you can stuff them ideas right there, Garrett. On account of I’ve already heard all the jokes about mastodons and blue oxen.”
“Then I shan’t belabor the obvious. Actually, I was going to suggest that you jog up and get our cart back. Singe packed us a load of sandwiches.” She’d also eaten a load of sandwiches along the way but I hoped a few might have survived. And if not, I’d at least get a respite from the mighty lover’s whining.
Marsha thought that was about the best idea he’d heard all week. He took off right away, tossing back, “Keep an eye on Doris, will you?”
“I will indeed.” On account of I didn’t want to be in the wrong place when the big goof tripped over his own feet and came tumbling down.
I made my rounds of prisoners and patients. They were all being incredibly stubborn about recovering, though I now saw some signs that they were coming back. Singe had begun babbling in her sleep, thankfully mostly in ratfolk cant. My grasp of the dialect is feeble. I was embarrassed only about half the time.
Doris was coming along fine. He made sense about seventy percent of the time. He stayed fine as long as he didn’t get up and try to walk around. His sense of balance was out of whack. When he did try to walk he drifted sideways. Then he fell over.
Twenty minutes after Marsha left we had a visitor. Some sort of vineyard manager or overseer or supervisor, name of Boroba Thring. Boroba was a fat little brown guy on a skinny little brown donkey. He believed devoutly in his right to claim everyone and everything in sight in the name of his employer, evicting me in the meantime. Evidently he seldom dealt with anyone who told him “No.” He’d come visiting alone and didn’t see that as a disadvantage. He was one of those particularly irritating characters who couldn’t conceive of anyone thwarting him, let alone ignoring him. Which is what I did for a while when first he spouted his nonsense. Once I became sufficiently sick of his voice, I said, “Hey, Doris. You can have this one to play with.”
Thring didn’t last long. I had Doris dump him in with the other prisoners. After that I passed the time amusing myself by figuring out how to strip silver elves.
The material they wore was tough but I discovered that it wouldn’t stand up to a really sharp piece of steel.
Marsha arrived with the cart. “You’re probably gonna want to keep those people in the shade, Garrett. I’ve seen albinos with more color to them.”
“They definitely don’t get out much.” My, oh, my, the cargo area on the back of the cart still contained sandwiches that Singe hadn’t eaten. And some beer in stoneware bottles. That was a nice surprise. I shared the sandwiches with the grolls. I shared the beer with me. I reserved the last sandwich and went to see Kip.
49
“This is the way it goes, kid.” I waved the sandwich, took a small bite. “You can talk to me, the nice guy who’s here to help you. Or you can talk to the Guard when they get here and take over. I know. You’re a tough guy. You’ve been getting yourself ready for this in your daydreams for the last fifteen years. And so far it hasn’t hurt much more than an ordinary dream. But when the Guards get here they’ll have someone from the Hill with them. And you know those people won’t think any more of stepping on you than they would of stomping a roach.”
I looked into Kip’s eyes and tried to imagine what he was seeing as he looked at me. Definitely not what I thought I was. Probably just a minor villain, laughing and rubbing his hands together while cackling about having ways to make him talk.
Time was getting to be a problem.
What I had to get around was Kip’s absolute vision of himself as the hero of his own story. Which at this point meant crushing him in a major way because I couldn’t come up with a means by which he could see an honorable escape route he could use without believing his escape was some sort of wicked betrayal.
I did some estimating of how much time I might yet have before those I’d summoned arrived. Seemed like it should be quite a while yet if things ran their usual course in officialdom.
I did some soul-searching, too. Because I wanted to know why some part of m
e was so convinced that it was important for me to get to Lastyr and Noodiss.
When I start thinking, and wondering about my own motives, life really starts to slow down. I can see why Morley gets impatient with me.
Marsha built us a fire. Doris had recovered enough to help without falling in. I gathered some of my favorite people in the circle of warmth. Singe. Playmate. Saucerhead. Casey and a member each from the other crews. They didn’t look like much naked. The males were like shriveled up old prunes. Like mummies. One of the two females wasn’t much more promising. The other got barely passing marks from me because I possess a prejudiced eye.
I hoped somebody would thaw out and tell me something interesting.
Neither Doris nor Marsha had any trouble leaving brother Dojango a subject in the realm of silence. Dojango never said anything interesting. Dojango just said.
Saucerhead recovered first. He was in a predictably foul temper. He insisted he was starving.
“Save yourself some agony,” I told him. “I’ve been where you’re at now, three times. If you try to eat anything it’ll come right back up.”
“Let me learn the hard way.” His stomach growled agreement.
“Your choice. But the only edibles in the area are those grapes up yonder. And if those were ripe they would’ve been picked already.”
Saucerhead wasn’t interested in common sense or rationality but he could handle them when they happened. “Then I’m going back to sleep.” Presumably a trick he’d learned in the army. Doze as much as you can until flying misfortune makes you get up and go to work.
“Don’t get into it too deep. I sent for the Guard. I can’t see you wanting to be lying around here napping when they show.”
“Which won’t be for a while. And I can count on my good friend Garrett to kick me in the slats and wake me up as soon as he sees them coming over yonder ridge. Go on and get away from me. My head is pounding and I ain’t in no mood.”
I did get a smile out of Playmate before he turned nasty on me. Somehow, while he was unconscious, all his pain and misery had become my fault. Ignoring the incredibly stupid thing he’d done, chasing after a Kayne Prose who wasn’t even the real deal, a dozen miles into the countryside.
Singe tried harder to be nice when she came around, but she did find it difficult to be understanding about the food shortage.
Seems I spend my whole life listening to people complain.
Maybe I should get into the priest racket. But I’m either too cynical or not cynical enough.
I told Singe, “If hunger becomes a bad enough problem we’ll eat our pal Casey over there.”
Casey didn’t respond even though he was awake.
None of the elves seemed able to communicate without their clothes on.
50
I took a nap myself. It lasted through most of the night. I awakened to find my accomplices feeling better physically but no less testy. They all complained of hunger. The prisoners were all awake now, too, but were unable, or unwilling, to communicate. When I gave Casey his suit back, in hopes that that would help, but he just stared at the ruins and shook his head. Evidently my knifework had deprived him of his sorcery permanently.
I said, “I’ve had a thought.”
Saucerhead grumbled, “Don’t go spraining your brain.”
“This one just popped right up, no work at all.”
“Like a toadstool, probably. Growing on a cow pie.’
“Somebody from town should be showing up pretty soon. But they don’t need to find the rest of you here. They don’t know about you so there’s no need for you to deal with their crap.”
Playmate said, “They’ll just hunt us down later.”
“Not if I don’t tell them. None of these elves can talk.”
“There’s that grapestomper.”
“He’s only seen the big guys. I can make him a deal that’ll guarantee his silence.”
Playmate gave up arguing. He enjoyed official scrutiny as little as the next man. “What about Kip? We haven’t found Kip. Kip is what this mess is all about. It’s all a waste of time, money, and pain if we don’t get the kid back.”
“I’ll keep looking. He’s got to be here somewhere.”
“I have to take him back, Garrett.”
“I know.” Overly moral me, I’d decided that I couldn’t let a kid fall into Colonel Block’s hands. Not even that kid. Block is a decent enough guy — for a royal functionary — but there are a lot of people, way nastier than me, that he’s obliged to keep happy. And Kip meant nothing to him personally. There were ten thousand Kips in town.
Maybe I get him together with Kayne Prose. Make Kip mean something long enough for the Hill folk to lose interest.
I strolled over to the discus. I climbed inside. The bulk of a sandwich awaited me beside the hatch to Kip’s compartment. I was tempted to enjoy it myself. But I was concerned, too. That sandwich had drawn no flies. When I reflected on the matter I realized that I had yet to see any insect inside the aerial ship.
Now there was a sorcery worth stealing.
“Hello, Kip. This could be your lucky day. I have something for you to eat and a chance for you to get out of here before Baron Dreadlore and the Civil Guards arrive.” Dreadlore was a fabrication but somebody with a name very much like that would turn up soon. Maybe several of them, considering how much damage a sorcerer could imagine himself doing if he owned the secret magery of flight.
“Water.”
“Dang me, Kip.” I hadn’t even thought about water. I should have. I must be getting senile. “There’s a whole big pond of the stuff right outside. And a nice cold spring. You still want to be stubborn?”
Yes, he did.
I told him, “They got hold of your mother and Rhafi, you know.”
He croaked, “That was Casey.”
“How would you know? How would you know that name?”
“The Drople and the Graple both told me. They have ways of observing things that are happening in the city.” He didn’t explain who the Drople and the Graple were. Two of his captors, presumably.
“They talked to you?”
“They hoped to convert me to their cause. They didn’t get the job done.” It was nice to see the kid too weak to be a smart-ass. “I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. Lastyr and Noodiss are the only ones of them that I ever actually do get. They just want to go home.”
“How’d they get here in the first place?”
“In a sky vessel. Like this one. But they didn’t know how to work it well enough. They crashed it.”
“I don’t recall the incident.”
“They crashed in the river. Whatever’s left of their ship is underwater.”
At last I was starting to dig something out. Not that it made a lick of sense.
“That being the case, why not let Casey take them home?”
“Because Casey isn’t here to take them home. Casey is here to take them to prison.”
“They’re escaped convicts?”
Kip was losing patience with me and my questions. “No. They have the wrong politics. Although politics isn’t exactly what it is. Not like what we mean when we say politics here. It’s all politics and philosophy and science and law and research with all three groups. And even though I’ve talked and talked about it with Lastyr and Noodiss I still don’t understand much better than you do without ever having heard them explain anything. It seems like there’s a war going on between people who’ve got different ideas about how knowledge should be handled. The party Lastyr and Noodiss belong to, the Brotherhood of Light, believe that knowledge is the birthright of all intelligent life-forms. That it should be freely shared with anybody able to understand it. That’s why they came here. So they could teach us.”
I believe I’ve mentioned my tendency toward the cynical reaction. I sneered at the charity of Kip’s friends.
I said, “The way you’re hacking and croaking, I’ll bet you’re ready for a long, cool drink
of springwater.”
Kip grunted.
“So point the way for me.”
In complete exasperation, the boy told me, “I don’t know where they are!”
“You know how to contact them. Let’s go, Kip. It isn’t a game anymore. It isn’t an adventure. People are coming for you who’ll pull pieces off you like you’re a bug. The stakes are probably a lot bigger than either of us can imagine.”
He gave me a look that belittled my imagination. I kept plugging. “We need to do whatever we can to get ourselves out of their way.”
The kid looked at the stale sandwich but didn’t fold. I had to admire him even if, from my point of view, he was being stubborn for all the wrong reasons.
“You win, kid. Eat hearty.” Time to change over to Plan Q.
51
“I found him,” I told Playmate. “They had him stashed in some kind of locker. Marsha! Get everybody ready to hit the road. We’re gonna move as soon as we can get the kid cleaned up. Playmate, take him to the pond.”
My instructions inspired a hundred questions. I ignored them all, located my local buddy Mr. Thring. He had value under the new plan. He glared daggers once I removed his blindfold but he’d begun to understand that bluster and attitude weren’t his best tools here. “Mr. Thring. Good morning. I’ve been talking with my associates about what we should do with you. Most of them think we should take you over to the pond and hold you under until you can’t remember names or faces anymore.”
Surprise and fear lit up the dusky round face of the estate manager.
“But it seems to me that you might be more use to us healthy. If you’ll help us with a little something and can leave us comfortably assured that you wouldn’t discuss your adventures with anyone later on.”
Thring was eager to provide assurances. He couldn’t by virtue of having been bound and gagged.
