Petty Pewter Gods

by Glen Cook

  Dean slipped out to help Slim. Slim was going to be irked. Not all of my empties carried his chop.

  I denned up in my office. Slim didn’t need to see me. He might tell somebody later. Or he might insist we review my fickle relationships with beer haulers.

  I heard the door close barely after I sat down. I never caught a snarl of complaint from Slim. Something was wrong. I headed for the hallway.

  Dean had just passed my door. He had a pony keg on his shoulder. That’s hardly enough beer to wet your whistle. “What’s that?”

  “All he could deliver right now. All he had left on his cart. I took what I could get.”

  I followed him into the kitchen. The empties had not stirred. “What about those?”

  “He didn’t have room on his cart. He’ll be back, he said. He said business is good, what with the soldiers coming home. Said he’s working fourteen-hour days.”

  Wouldn’t you know? “I smell a beer shortage coming on. Another of the unexpected horrors of peace.” I went scurrying toward the front door. Better have Slim bring me a cartload all my own. I would become a beer hoarder.

  Garrett, please.

  I gave it up, just took a peek through the hole. Slim sure enough did have kegs and barrels practically dripping off his cart. “I guess those human rights guys need a lot to keep them going.” Beer drinking is an essential part of the preliminary rituals of political demonstrations.

  “Hang on, Smiley.”

  Yes?

  “Use my eyes. Take a gander up the street, past Old Lady Cardonlos’ place.”

  I see nothing but a somewhat substantial peasant girl.

  “That’s Cat. The one who gave me the ride on the flying horse.”

  I have her. Half a minute passed. She is not quite mortal, Garrett. Ah. She is an interesting child. And this house is her destination. She is not aware that it is the center of a great deal of attention. She lacks some very basic divine senses despite being the child of a god.

  “She never struck me as any genius. Hey, Dean! We’re going to have company. Take her in to His Nibs. We don’t want her to know I’m here.”

  Dean offered me a look at his hardest glare. “I hope there is money in this somewhere. I have no interest in putting on a show for one of your prospects.”

  “It’s all business. Just let her in. Offer her tea and a muffin and hand her off to the Dead Man.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Thank you.

  Both sounded as though no greater imposition had settled upon their lives before.

  “You wanted to interview Cat, Smiley. Now’s your big chance.”

  34

  Those things out there do not appear to be aware of her as anything but another mortal. I sense no interest at all.

  “Intriguing.”

  Extremely.

  Nobody knew who Cat was, but Cat was in the game. “Old Bones, this may be more complicated than I thought.”

  Probably. And she may be more of a challenge than I had anticipated. Her mind has a remarkably stout shell surrounding it. It conceals her memories and all but her surfacemost thoughts. There is enough on the surface, though, to confirm the notion that she serves neither the Shayir nor the Godoroth.

  “That’s hot news. Shucks. Recomplication wasn’t what I wanted right now.”

  Dean continued to grumble his way up the hall. He had a pie in the oven and didn’t think it was reasonable that he be expected to watch the door as well. We were turning into a bunch of cranky old men.

  Had to be the Dead Man’s wicked influence.

  Pshaw! Allow her to knock a second time before you open the door, Dean. I need time to get the bird back here.

  Dean responded with select commentary worthy of Mr. Big himself. I have to admit I felt a certain sympathy for his position.

  Go into your office, Garrett.

  He was surly. Still had that one eye inside my head.

  I went, but watched as long as I dared.

  Dean stiffened, presumably getting instructions. He really hates having the Dead Man get into his head. I managed to get out of sight before he yanked the door open, not waiting for any damned second knock while his pie was baking.

  The Goddamn Parrot blasted inside, staggering the old man, arriving with his beak going full speed. “Lay your glims on this bimbo! Hooters deluxe!”

  “What is that?” Cat squeaked. My erstwhile traveling companion seemed a touch irritable.

  Welcome to the house of aggravation, dear.

  “A pet. Ignore it. Product of a wastrel youth. It doesn’t understand that it is offensive,” Dean replied. “It escaped some time ago, going out to search for Mr. Garrett, my employer. Mr. Garrett has vanished. Wenching again, no doubt. They were inseparable.”

  I considered what choke holds might best serve in a debate with a man Dean’s age.

  Garrett. The creature No-Neck has been warned. He recognized the bird but failed to take its message seriously. He seemed to think you were trying to pull some clever practical joke.

  Great. “He didn’t get the name No-Neck for no reason,” I whispered. But would I have listened to a talking bird I had met only once, when both of us were drinking?

  Probably not.

  Unless it was a redhead. Dean. Please close the door.

  “Cheap shot!”

  The Goddamn Parrot kept yapping like he thought Cat was Winger. Maybe he couldn’t tell the difference.

  Near as I could tell from the racket, she kept getting in Dean’s way, possibly because she didn’t know how to deal with the Goddamn Parrot. No matter how obnoxious the critter gets it’s never good manners to stomp somebody’s pet in their own house.

  Then the awful truth plopped like a great stinking lump falling behind the tallest herbivorous thunder lizards.

  “Hey, Honeybuns, dig the weasel out of this dump and let’s get going.” Yes. Him. And his humming wings.

  The Goddamn Parrot shrieked and headed down the hall. Dean clumped after him, exercising his own vocabulary. The bumblebee buzz drifted. I heard rattling at the door to the small front room.

  “Nothin’ in there. Stinks, though. That bird. Let’s look at this next one.”

  I went over behind my desk and picked up the spare headknocker. It was time to find out how much power a cherub had.

  Calmly. Calmly.

  The runt’s mouth never stopped. Neither did his banger. The smoke began coming in under my office door.

  The Goddamn Parrot’s beak never stopped.

  Dean kept swearing.

  Cat kept after everybody. She sounded like she was about to break down crying.

  Be patient, the Dead Man sent. The girl is rattled. This is to our advantage. I see weaknesses in the armor around her mind.

  “Oh, excellent,” I muttered. “And what about that stinking, banger-smoking cherub?”

  Cherub?

  “The one in the hallway with the rest of that baby riot? The half-bug little guy trying to get into everything?”

  Cat shrieked, “Fourteen, stop that!”

  Oh. That cherub. And, somehow, I knew he could not sense the little monster at all except through the senses of others. Presumably he was seeing through Cat’s eyes, since I was not out there. Unchosen mortal Dean ought to be blind to the critter.

  Would ordinary mortals smell the smoke even if they could not see the smoker?

  “That very cherub,” I said. “Since you’ve found these chinks, chip away.” And good luck with the runt. You marvel, you.

  Your attitude needs adjustment desperately.

  “And you need to get back outside of my head, Chuckles.” Gotcha. I felt his withdrawal. He didn’t do it as a favor to me.

  He was going to need all his minds to deal with Cat and Fourteen.

  I tried to commune with Eleanor. Eleanor wasn’t interested. And who could blame her?

  35

  Garrett. I have attained control. You may join us if you so desire.

  “Oh, I will. I’ve
got to see this.”

  The Dead Man was smugly self-satisfied. Which was not an unusual state of affairs. When things go wrong for him that is always someone else’s fault, but his triumphs are all his own, brilliantly unshared. Just ask him.

  “A prime candidate for Amazon school,” I cracked. Cat did look like a leading contender for future queen-ship of the women warriors. “Another Winger.”

  Not quite. This one is completely healthy and totally honest and wholesome. The girl you will want your daughter to be.

  “There anything inside that handsome head?” Cat was that kind of girl when you got her out into the light.

  I was paying her no mind, really. I was studying the cherub. It was perched on the arm of the Dead Man’s chair, frozen solid as some stone gewgaw on a temple wall.

  Handsome, by the way, is a physically pretty woman who has no attractive pizzazz whatsoever. Something like being your good-looking sister. A perfect match for your feebleminded cousin Rudolf from Khuromal. Give her a pat on the hand and a weak smile, then go find the girls who want to be bad.

  “You accomplish anything with the runt there?”

  I succeeded in extinguishing his smoke. The room stank. The hallway outside stank. I managed to petrify him. Otherwise he has proven intractable.

  “Shut up and put out is good enough for me. How about Cat?”

  There is a great deal in there, but I cannot reach it without her cooperation. She is quite strong.

  “Must be the blood.”

  Sneer. A mental sneer is a remarkable thing.

  “Hey! This is a woman who rides flying horses and thinks it’s fun.”

  The Dead Man relaxed his grasp ever so slightly. The light of awareness grew in Cat’s eyes. She shuddered, shifted her gaze to stare at the Dead Man. Her expression became one of horror. “We didn’t know that,” she murmured. She looked at me. “So you are here.”

  “I are. I live here. What’s your excuse?”

  She remained cool under pressure. She reached out to the cherub, touched him gently. “Poor Fourteen. He’ll be unfit to live with after this.”

  “He’s fit now? Ratmen would run him off.”

  “I came looking for you.”

  I settled into the chair that we keep there for me. It doesn’t see much use. I put my feet up on a stool and examined my left thumbnail. Yep. Still there. “Why? Do I know you? Do we have a relationship? I don’t think so.”

  “You deserted me before I could...”

  “Definitely. Before you could anything. Especially anything unpleasant.”

  “But I got you out...”

  “I haven’t forgotten. Last night wasn’t that long ago. But I can remember rescuing a light colonel from the Venageti so the Karentine army could hang him. I walked before you finished haggling with whoever you were delivering me to.”

  “I was taking you to my mother. We argue all the time. That’s just the way we are.”

  Maybe. It happens. I waited. It may be true.

  Cat said, “She was the one who wanted you freed from the Shayir.”

  “I appreciate that. She didn’t have time to spring me herself?”

  Gently, but continue. She is beginning to leak. This is very interesting.

  “Mother doesn’t dare stay away long. It might be noticed. They’re all so paranoid these days. Because of the temple business. And she can’t manage Chiron and Otsalom.”

  Was I supposed to have a clue here? “Hell. I have trouble with five-card pitch.”

  Chiron and Otsalom, it appears, are winged horses common to the myths of the peoples of the city states of the Lumbar Coast a few dozens of your generations ago.

  “Back around the time you went to sea?”

  Cat looked baffled. The Dead Man ignored the remark. Coincidentally, cherubs appear in those myths, none of them named. And that whole family of religions is a branch from the trunk that produced the Church and its local relatives.

  “Chiron and Otsalom are my horse friends, Mr. Garrett. Mother never learned to manage them. She never had time. It’s very difficult for her to get away. And I have a knack. She asked me to get you out and bring you to her. I tried.”

  “I’m grateful. I wasn’t enjoying captivity at all.”

  Then I suggest you get rid of that goofy grin.

  Darn. He can see through others’ eyes.

  “Savage.” I continued, “I just wish I knew who she was and why she bothered.” I recalled that the Lambar Coast has been a Karentine tributary since imperial times. For so long that there is no separatist sentiment there anymore.

  The ships and boats and barges that dock in TunFaire often carry Lambar sailors, Garrett. Working ships is what the Lambar peoples do.

  “They do. And that’s interesting. What’s going on, Cat?”

  She put on a stubborn face.

  We live in a time of amazements, Garrett. Would you suspect the existence of a temple serving the needs of Lambar sailors, down in the Dream Quarter?

  “Some of us are surrounded by amazements. Some of us are just too lazy to die. Of course there’s a temple for Lambar sailors. I’d almost bet your life there’s more than one. You’re a soldier or a sailor, even a merchant sailor, you have to do something after you’ve spent your wages in the Tenderloin and they’ve thrown you out of your rooming house for not paying your rent. Come on. You’ve had time to dig. What’s her story?”

  Cat gaped at me. She moved nearer the cherub, though reluctantly because that put her nearer the Dead Man. Being able to touch the little guy seemed to boost her confidence.

  You told me she looked like Lang and Imar. Not so? But the fact is, she looks even more like Imara.

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  I am not. Her divine half comes from her philandering mother. She is unaware of her father’s identity. She knows only that he is not Imar, for which she is grateful. She does not think this consciously, but she suspects that her mother may not know who her father is. Imar, by the way, is unaware of her existence and, it would seem, Imara is eager to maintain his ignorance. I suspect that, should he learn the truth, he would indulge in one of those infamous celestial rages that tear down mountains and sink continents. Or he would at least cause the creeks to back up and mice to get into the corncrib.

  “Huh?” Whoa. Who was getting wound up now?

  I didn’t figure Imar and the horse he rode in on had much heavenly oomph left between them, but why thumb our noses? You ask for trouble and you’re damned well going to get it. “That’s ringing the changes on the old holy bed shuffle, isn’t it? Where do I fit?”

  I intended the last question for Cat. She didn’t answer me. Neither did the Dead Man, really. I am unable to reach that information, Garrett. She may not have it. She seems to be motivated mainly by a desire to be a dutiful daughter.

  “Don’t look to me like she’s all here right now.” Maybe she was mentally allergic to the Dead Man. She seemed to be aging before my eyes, taking on that lost look you sometimes see in stroke victims. She had a firm grip on the cherub. I doubt I could have beaten it out of her hand.

  Easy, Garrett. Calm yourself.

  Sometimes you stumble without seeing it coming. My mother suffered a series of strokes. A stroke finally killed her. In between the first and last, my cousins took the brunt because my brother and I were in the Cantard. She outlived my brother, but I got home often enough to see it at its worst.

  It will tear your heart out when your mom all of a sudden can’t remember your name.

  Easy, I say.

  “‘The pain still remains,’” I told him, quoting a popular soldiers’ poem. He would be hearing that a lot if he kept up his interest in current politics. The Call had set it to music. When the fighting is done and the long night is gone, the pain still remains.

  Manage it, Garrett.

  “Getting short-tempered, are we?”

  We have an opportunity here. This child is the stone at the center.

  “The fruit ou
tside looks pretty tasty, too.”

  Mental sneer. She cannot be reached. Not at her heart. And now I see that it is not of her own choosing.

  I’m a normal, red-blooded TunFairen boy, so I wasn’t much concerned about her heart when I looked her over. I grumped, “You manage your own pain.”

  Cat was drifting, but she was not catatonic. She knew we were talking about her and probably did follow my half of the conversation. She did not appear to resent it. Assuming the Dead Man was right about her birth, she undoubtedly had had plenty of experience being an outsider.

  Ah. A plan presents itself. Inasmuch as you find Cat such a delectable morsel, you might try doing what you do so well. Charm her. See where that goes. She may lead you to valuable information.

  “Like we have that kind of time?” He dwells entirely in the realm of fantasy when he pictures my abilities to understand and communicate with the opposite sex. Old Bones, they are way too opposite for me.

  And it was not like him to give up on himself so easily. Let Garrett do it? Not when he thought so much of his own ability to get inside another mind. Either he overestimated Cat or he was sneaking around to get an angle on me. This news could break his heart, but it seemed to me that, as is the case with so many young ladies her age, there just wasn’t a whole lot in Cat’s head to find.

  Faintly, faintly, like the remotest, most tenuous whiff of weed smoke drifting from an alley, gone in a blink: Nog is ines...

  I shuddered.

  That was not pleasant.

  “You ought to smell him.”

  Not a problem for me anymore.

  “Nice to know there are advantages to being dead.”

  The watchers have begun to move in slowly as members of each pantheon try to stay a few feet ahead of their competitors. I need Dean to send the bird out again.

  From the kitchen came an uncommon construction blurted in response to the Dead Man’s touch. I heard Dean stomp toward the front door. I heard him say something very unpleasant to Mr. Big. The Goddamn Parrot did not respond. Maybe he had discovered manners.