Cruel Zinc Melodies

by Glen Cook

  No problem. No pain. I’d decided to continue giving Morley Dotes a rest.

  Then I saw Playmate, heading home from my place. He waved but didn’t stop. His business and life were at the mercy of a brother-in-law who should’ve been drowned at birth.

  The people of TunFaire were still out enjoying the weather. Several stopped me and wanted to talk, usually about something I couldn’t have found less interesting.

  We all have our quirks and special passions. Mine are beer and beautiful women. Lately, beer and beautiful woman, redheaded and blessed with a surfeit of attitude.

  One of whom was waiting in ambush. She overran me when I got home.

  When I got a chance to come up for air, I gasped, “Hunh! Hunh! Hunh!” When my heart slowed down and the rest of me stopped shaking, I just had to check the gift horse’s teeth. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I thought I made that obvious.”

  “You know how my head works. If it looks too good to be true, I figure it is.”

  “Should I be flattered or offended?” Tinnie asked.

  “You'll decide that no matter what I say. I’m in the camp that figures you’re too good to be true.”

  “Ah. You sweet talker. Too bad you have all these other people around here.”

  Singe could not stay away. She turned up to ask, “What did the principal have to say?”

  “He said do the job. Stop coming round getting underfoot. Come back when it’s done. Go have a beer. I’m busy here.”

  “You have a room. You do not have to mate in the hallway.”

  Tinnie snickered into my neck.

  The woman is shameless when it suits her.

  My partner amazed me by favoring discretion. I heard nothing from him.

  Dean did appear to offer us an evening meal.

  Singe saw the lay of the land. Sullen, she went back to one of her private projects.

  “What’s her problem?” Tinnie asked. “She trying to seduce you again?”

  “That was just a phase. Adolescent fantasy. She got over it. Now she thinks she’s a storyteller. She says she’s written a book about me. And now she needs some interesting stories to put in it.”

  “I should get together with her. I could tell her about you before you met.”

  “I’m sure you could. And I’m just as sure that she don’t need any more ideas than what she’s got.”

  A faint fragrance of amusement tainted the psychic air momentarily. Old Bones no doubt conceiving a wicked notion that could find life only at my expense.

  There was no one in the hallway but Tinnie and me now. And she was having no trouble with the invisible eye that’s always there when the Dead Man is awake.

  It didn’t take her long to make me forget, either.

  She’s got skills, that girl.

  17

  The brain trust had gathered. Singe. Playmate. Saucerhead. John Stretch. With Old Bones in the background, ready to kibitz. Tinnie was in the doorway. She leaned against its frame in an indifferent, sluttish pose wasted on everybody. Me included. She wasn’t happy about that.

  Would you care to direct your thoughts in a less prurient direction?

  I said, “We need to brainstorm the situation at the World. Our efforts yesterday may not have done much more than stir up the bugs.”

  Saucerhead observed, “It’s freaking hard to get the bugs out of anywhere. Mice and rats, same thing. You wipe out the mess you got, another one moves in.”

  It is notoriously difficult to remove vermin and keep them removed. This instance will be no exception. But it should prove less difficult than the sort of general debugging you would find familiar. There will be a finite number of these mutant insects. Though that could be a large number. A sustained effort should destroy them faster than they can breed.

  He was giving this more thought than he pretended.

  You are correct, Garrett. Though not in the way you think.

  I glimpsed something I didn’t have the mental capacity to grasp. A three-dimensional mind map of the universe in the earth around and under the World. Developed, with John Stretch’s help, from the minds of rats that had gone down there and had brought back memories of sights and smells. Especially smells.

  John Stretch assures me that regular rats count on their sense of smell more than dogs do. Thus the thing inside the Dead Man’s mind was a visualized translation of information collected mainly by rat snoots.

  Rats are crafty. But rats aren’t much smarter than a sack of hammers. I wasn’t ready to bet my life, fortune, and sacred honor on what my sidekick could put together from their mad, crippled rodent memories.

  I said, “We could handle this whole thing fast if we could dump a million gallons of water into the warrens under the World.”

  Flooding the bug tunnels was an obvious move. Figuring out how to deliver the flood was not.

  “How about poison gas?” Playmate asked. “Some kinds would sink down into the bug warrens the way water would.”

  “Like?”

  “Fumes from burning sulfur.”

  John Stretch said, “I would like to try rats again. Using more of them.”

  The Dead Man touched me privately. Allow John Stretch the effort. Insisting on a much larger effort. Ten thousand rats if that is what is needed. Test the strength of this absurd conjunction.

  “Huh?”

  There must be sorcery involved. To explain the size of the bugs. The absurdity arises in the mix of insects that have mutated.

  Someone was doing to bugs what had been done to rats in the last century?

  You are unlikely to lose much money betting that way.

  I announced, “Guys, this may be a worse problem than I thought.”

  Engage brain before opening mouth, the Dead Man snapped. Think before you pop off.

  “Huh?”

  You are getting ahead of yourself. It is possible the problem can be solved by application of a large number of rats. If it cannot, then you have your worse problem.

  So I said, “Never mind. John Stretch. By all means, take another crack. But go for overwhelming numbers. All the rats you can round up. If you can’t run them all at the same time, fine. Use them in shifts.”

  I need to know the outer bounds of the insect infestation. In all dimensions.

  He didn’t say it but I understood. He wanted to isolate the point of origin of the giant bugs.

  That would be handy to know. We could toss one fire-bomb in there....

  Garrett. The most obvious and direct approach may not be the best.

  “For who?”

  All concerned. You have to know what is going on before you blow things up and burn things down. You cannot approach all problems with the methods espoused by Mr. Dotes. It is possible that the bugs are an unfortunate by-blow of something positive happening in that area. The creator of the bugs may be unaware of the effect of his work on the insect population.

  “Evil spirits and psychotic demons are more likely.”

  No doubt. Nevertheless, it is important to examine and eliminate other possibilities. Unless you trip over some villain casting spells on cockroaches.

  “While practicing his evil laugh. Yeah.”

  The rest of the crowd watched like they expected to be entertained any minute now. Except that fiscal traitoress, Pular Singe, who toddled in with fermented barley soup for all hands. On good old Garrett.

  I wouldn’t earn any kudos dancing with the truth. They’d just accuse me of being a skinflint. Again.

  It’s so easy to spend the other guy’s dough.

  18

  The weather continued favorable. The surviving city trees were about to bud. To their sorrow. The snow and ice would return.

  Word was out. Garrett had a case. He had money. The street out front looked like I was gathering a wagon train for a volkswanderung. All six wagons boasted human drivers. Which said that John Stretch’s reach had gotten pretty long, pretty fast.

  Playmate had brought the same
coach round, too.

  There were ratpeople everywhere, all of them armed with cages or baskets full of regular rats. The neighbors were out in force, being nosy. Among them would be tin whistles in disguise.

  I had a mild hangover. Singe and her brother did, too. But Saucerhead and Playmate were bright and cheerful, ambling around with acres of teeth exposed to the breeze. Early birds. Let’em eat worms.

  What the hell became of all my old pals in the seize-the-night crowd?

  The only positive was, Tinnie was there beside me. A morning person. A lightning rod for all those bleak disappointments that haunt the world before noon.

  Saucerhead told me, “We need us some horse guys in tin suits with flags on their spears. And some halberdiers.”

  “How’s your bugling? You could sound the charge.”

  “That’s up to the rat king. This being all about him and his critters.”

  Saucerhead can be as literal as a hunk of granite.

  John Stretch was thinking like my imagination-challenged friend. “We are ready, Garrett.”

  “I are ready, too. Just waiting on Singe.” She’d had to duck inside. As usual.

  The watching tin whistles were restless. This big a show by ratpeople made them nervous.

  They will not interfere. Unless you fail to stop dithering long enough for me to fall asleep again.

  The reason for his impatience was in plain sight.

  Tinnie spotted her, too. “Hey. There’s Penny. I’m going to?”

  “No. She don’t want anything to do with us anymore. Except for His Nibs. And Dean, because she can mooch a meal off him.”

  Tinnie didn’t believe me. But she didn’t argue. She’d had a premonition that Alyx would turn up during festivities at the World. She wasn’t going to let her main guy go into danger that fierce without moral backup. The word “danger” being spelled “temptation.”

  My backup was about to get her back up. But Singe breezed out and helped herself to the next to last seat in Playmate’s coach. It took my favorite redhead a hundredth of a second to assess the situation and make sure that the last seat didn’t go to waste.

  This early worm was going to get some unwanted exercise. “Story of my life,” I grumbled.

  Tinnie gave me a dark look, followed by one of her blinding smiles.

  Lucky for me, the wagons didn’t roll fast.

  Unlucky for everyone else, the wagons didn’t roll fast. We had time to acquire a patina of curious urchins. Saucerhead, trudging along beside me, grumbled, “You’d think we were some kind of circus, or something.”

  Or something. “Been a long winter.”

  Our entertainment value faded once we got to the World. The ratfolk took their cages and baskets and went inside. Then nothing happened.

  An hour later, Singe reported, “It seems to be working.”

  It might be, but before I left the house I’d seen Joe Kerr and had gotten a backup plan running. Here it came now, in the form of a goat cart pulled by a pygmy troll named Rocky. Rocky’s family were all midgets, the tallest not going more than six feet. They’re unobtrusive, rock-solid, foundation-type royal subjects who specialize in chemical supplies for sorcerers, physicians, apothecaries, and anyone else whose coin has a shine on it. He was delivering twenty pounds of powdered sulfur that I meant to fire up as soon as John Stretch was done for the day.

  Rocky presented a flour sack leaking whiffs of fine yellow powder. I gave him several pieces of silver. He grunted, “Good,” in a voice so deep it seemed like part of an earthquake. He started moving again. Slowly.

  Trolls don’t need to hurry. They don’t have to run away, they don’t have to catch, they have no need to get anywhere right now.

  Earlier during the wait I’d taken a turn around the World site. I hadn’t seen a soul, workman or watchman, nor the city employees who had been there yesterday. No place ought to be that deserted. TunFaire abhors a vacuum. If no one else was around, thieves should’ve been trying to find something worth carting off.

  Saucerhead had noticed. “They’s something weird going on here, Garrett.”

  “No shit.” I set the sack of sulfur down out of traffic.

  “You hear music?”

  “No.”

  “I thought I heard music a minute ago.”

  One of John Stretch’s pals headed our way. Lugging a beetle as big as a lamb. He didn’t editorialize; he just dropped the monster when I didn’t offer to take it. He headed back to the wars.

  Most of the gallery had wandered away. A few kids still hung around in hopes of finding a pocket to pick. But when that bug hit the cobblestones you could feel the shock start to radiate at the speed of rumor.

  TunFaire would be in a panic before sunset.

  “Yeah, right,” Saucerhead said when I started to worry out loud. “Like the time you got into it with that clutch of weird gods. All anybody cared about was the snow.”

  He had a point. Strange stuff happens. People shrug it off unless it happens to them.

  Rather than panicking, my fellow subjects would likely come bury the World in bodies, hoping to see something novel.

  Playmate said, “Hey, Garrett, whack that thing with something. It ain’t dead.”

  It lay on its back. Its legs were twitching. Its wings, ditto. Then it stopped struggling. It seemed to be assessing its situation.

  “Garrett!”

  It flipped. It faced me. Big brown jaw things clacked.

  It charged.

  I delivered a masterful spinning kick. After which I deposited the opposite side of my lap on the cobblestones. A snicker came from the coach, where my sweetie was evading the weather.

  The bug smacked into the coach’s big back wheel. The hub did some damage. The bug fell, shuddered, and expired.

  “Maybe less dangerous than they look.”

  I’m not big on reasoning this stuff out, but I figure bugs naturally come the size that’s best for them. Which meant the normal vermin crop are exactly the right size.

  So, back to the mad sorcerer notion.

  19

  “Mr. Garrett?”

  A kid had come up behind me. “Kip Prose! How are you?” I hadn’t seen him for a while. He’d grown, though he was still barely a mouse breath more than five feet. His blond hair was longer and wilder, his eyes bluer and crazier. His waist was more substantial. His freckles were more numerous. He did a better job of holding still, but broke into sudden, brief fits of scratching and twitching. Wealth hadn’t changed him inside.

  Cypres Prose is the strangest kid I ever met. He has three redeeming qualities. Two any man can see at a glance. A gorgeous mother, Kayne Prose. And an older sister, Cassie Doap, who makes Mom look dowdy. The third quality is less obvious: the boy is a screaming genius. Of no special ambition, but with ideas that could make a lot of people rich. Maybe including me.

  I have that small interest in the manufactory producing three-wheels, writing sticks, and other innovations sprung from Kip Prose’s twisted brain. I have the points because I found the genius, kept him alive, and put him together with people who have the money and space to create a manufacturing concern. The Weiders and the Tates.

  “I’m doing quite well, Mr. Garrett. And yourself?”

  I was suspicious immediately. Be abidingly suspicious of any teenage male who is mannerly, respectful, and absent attitude.

  That kid is up to something. Guaranteed.

  Kip wasn’t alone. Two friends, of a similarly weird appearance, had stayed across the street. They pretended no interest in what was going on.

  Definitely suspicious.

  Tinnie is a clever judge of people. When she bothers. Usually she deploys her skills against me alone. She made an exception here. “And how is your mother? And your sister, Cassie?” She turned on the flaming redheaded heat, guaranteed to send Kip into cardiac arrest, turn him to gelatin, and make him speak in tongues with vocabularies of one syllable.

  Kip chirped like a frog. Once.

&nbs
p; Tinnie got very close to him.

  Kip knew who she was. One of those black widow fantasy women from the Tate tribe. He’d seen her around the manufactory. No doubt she’d imprinted herself on his libidinous consciousness.

  It’s bad enough when that wicked wench turns it on to an old jade like me. It’s fish in a barrel, targeting a repressed boy Cypres Prose’s age.

  “Oh, that’s good,” I said. “You fried his brain. How do I get anything out of him now?” Kip’s friends, I noted, were not pleased, either.

  “What do you want to know? Maybe I'll ask.”

  “All right. But afterward I’m going to drive a stake through your heart.”

  “That’s a straight line I could play with for... a minute or two.”

  “Promises, promises.”

  Kip resumed breathing.

  Tinnie told me, “You don’t want to know about his mother or sister. When I snap my fingers you will forget he has a mother or sister.” Snap!

  “Yes, master. I have no interest in the welfare of absent beautiful women. But now I know how you cast your spell on me.”

  That earned me a nasty look. I survived it and worse consequences because Kip’s eyes rolled back down. He began speaking actual words.

  I asked, “What the hell are you doing down here, Kip?”

  I could guess. He was a teenage boy. With the financial means to indulge a teenage boy’s fantasies. The Tenderloin was a stone’s throw on down the street.

  Not smart. You could get dead. A dozen different ways. Not all of them sudden.

  Clever lad, he avoided answering by responding to what I’d asked earlier. “Mom is fine. Kind of doesn’t know what to do with herself now that she doesn’t have to work all the time.”

  He has a significant interest in the manufacturing concern. Between them, he, his mother, and sister control the biggest chunk. He’d insisted.

  “You get her that house?”

  “The one where she always lived. It’s all hers, free and clear, now.”

  “That’s good. What are you doing down here? Not wasting yourself in the Tenderloin, I hope.”

  Kip turned bright red. Brighter than when Tinnie worked her witchcraft. He sputtered. Then choked out, “I’m just hanging out with my friends.” He indicated the impatient boys across the street. He and those two looked like one socially challenged pod. The friends were tense and irritated and eager to distance themselves from the World. “I just saw you and decided to say hi. What’re you doing?”