Cruel Zinc Melodies

by Glen Cook

  The sorcerers fought back. Against creatures of their own consciences. They danced with their nightmares. More or less.

  To do the wicked things they do, Hill folk have to have their consciences and souls pretty well tamed.

  Furious Tide of Light whispered, “Can you climb through this window?” Her eyes were a warm, inviting brown.

  Two or three of her could do so at the same time. Easily.

  “Yeah. But why?”

  “We’re making our getaway.” With eyes gone an amused, very pale blue. “Schnook has lost it. You’re an outsider. You don’t want to be where he can see you for the next several minutes.”

  I became aware of how crowded we were. And of the effect she was having on me. Which was too reminiscent of her impact on everyone else who got close to her, living or ghost.

  Her green eyes offered an invitation. For after we were safe.

  No cold bath being handy, I practiced my multiplication tables. Eight times seven is what? I can’t ever remember. What’s seven times eight?

  I swear, that chit could read my mind. “I don’t get many chances to be on my own.”

  Danger! Danger, Garrett! Deadly danger!

  Disappointment. Abiding disappointment. I got no chance to test my ability to resist a temptation so fierce.

  “Damn!” she swore, as I was worming my way out onto the roof. “How did he get done so fast?”

  I didn’t spot Barate Algarda right away. I was busy surviving a barrage of furious looks from my special redhead, who had escaped the custody of the honey pack and had returned.

  “Some other time,” the Windwalker told me. With promise like a forest fire.

  “Yeah. Like you said. Damn!”

  And thus I saved me the fury of a Furious Tide of Light scorned.

  Still, she gave me a look that would haunt me.

  And said, “Stand up. We’re going to jump.”

  I didn’t want to stand up. The World was shaking like it was warming up to star in an earthquake. And the roof slates were slick. But I did as I was told. Ever pliable me.

  The Windwalker wrapped an arm around me. “This would be easier if I wrapped everything around you.” We floated off the roof, began a slow descent. “Think about the possibilities in that.”

  That would haunt me, too.

  I’ve got a pretty good imagination.

  How come I got to grow up?

  72

  “You got a guilty look on you, Malsquando.”

  “Because you’re determined to make me feel guilty about something. Including getting away from bad people.”

  “I saw the way she was hanging on to you.”

  “Because I’d fall like a rock if she didn’t. And I don’t have the spring in my legs that I did when I was a Marine.” Then, for no reason that I can recall, I added, “She’s left-handed.”

  “Well, of course she is. Her kind always are.” Tinnie didn’t expand on that.

  Elsewhere, though nothing but the music had happened, the human population had gotten thin. The workmen were gone. Saucerhead’s team had decided they’d better keep an eye on the workmen. Tharpe hadn’t gone along. But he wanted to. Badly.

  Barate Algarda was having a discussion with the Windwalker much like mine with Tinnie. But less intense, and, like Tinnie, reserving all the suspicion for me.

  Furious Tide of Light had turned into the deathly shy wallflower. She kept trying to change the subject to the Bellman and bad behavior by cousin Link, and Schnook Avery getting “taken over by the beast.”

  It didn’t take her long to get Algarda focused on business.

  “Tinnie, godsdamnit, enough! This shit isn’t about you!”

  Miss Tate looked like some zombie horror had just come prancing out of an awful night. And he was me. And I felt like one. Almost.

  The redhead is nothing if not flexible. She adapted quick as a snap, with an absolute unspoken reservation. If Garrett was blowing smoke!...

  The racket from inside the World took on a sudden new, darker note. Everything capable of flying took sudden wing, getting the flock out of the neighborhood. I was amazed by how many sparrows there were.

  Panic even flushed a brace of giant beetles. They should’ve stayed hunkered down. They didn’t make thirty yards horizontally before they enjoyed a fatal encounter with the cobblestones.

  “And that’s that,” I said. “I hope.”

  The chaos inside tumbled into public. In the form of half a dozen high and mighties clearly stunned stupid and humbled, and all the worse for wear. Even from where I stood, poised to set a record in the quarter-mile dash to safety, it was clear that Shadowslinger had been bitten off by something that hadn’t seen her as more than it could chew. She was all torn up, at least on the outside.

  Link Dierber owed his pal Schnook a big kiss in a special place for having dragged his wicked ass outside. Schnook was sane again.

  The rest crawled and dragged one another into the weather, not a one grinning over a prank well played.

  What the hell? They had suffered a serious, collective ass-kicking. How? “I can’t claim those ghosts never hurt anybody anymore.”

  After half a minute of silence the zinc melody pounded out a few bars of a sinister-sounding march that faded into dark echoes.

  What appeared to be a young ghost, defined to the point where warts, freckles, and zits were individually obvious, leaped out of the World. It lugged a six-foot length of floor planking, six inches wide and two inches thick. It applied that to Link Dierber, then went after Schnook Avery? while bashing any of the others who got in its way. It stayed only a matter of seconds, then abandoned the board and fled into the World.

  Odd behavior for one of those ghosts. Who seemed vaguely familiar, on reflection. But it all happened so fast....

  Total silence. No talk. No music. The concert had ended. The fat lady had nothing more to say.

  Shadowslinger kept trying to get to her feet, kept falling back down. She had taken a truly hearty whack because she’d shown the bad judgment to be between the ghost and Schnook Avery.

  Those of us stupidly still in range just plain refused to believe our eyes. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t have happened. Those people were among the most dreadful of the dire, drear potentates of the Hill. Of all Karenta. Of the whole damned world. They were people who, collectively, the gods ought to fear. But Dierber was down, Avery was on his hands and knees and bleeding, and Shadowslinger looked like she might have lost the use of one arm.

  “Oh, Malsquando!” Tinnie gasped. “This just turned into some serious shit.” She doesn’t use that kind of language often. “We'll never get the World finished now!”

  That had begun to worry me, too. Max was going to be pissed off. He’d be in no mood to be confused by facts if Hill types started getting themselves dead on his property. That’s never good for business.

  Tin whistles tooted. Red tops came out of the woodwork. A few went chasing into the theater but the rest just rolled up, stopped, and stared at the battered sorcerers, unable to believe their own eyes. Not a one had any idea what to do now.

  Not good.

  They were likely to start hitting and breaking if they couldn’t think of anything more practical.

  Barate Algarda and I suffered the same mad impulse at the same moment. We shoved through the crowd, Furious Tide of Light moving in his wake.

  For me, the sensible thing would’ve been to stand back, lean on a handy wall, and hope I wouldn’t be noticed. Then maybe drift off somewhere, take an hour to enjoy some artificial courage. Instead, I just had to charge in there to try saving lives. Knowing the fallen, the injured, and the just plain confused, all deserved to be put down like mad dogs. And knowing Mrs. Garrett’s boy would get blamed no matter what.

  So here are Garrett, Algarda, and the Windwalker, trying to restore breath to the kind of people I always hoped the lightning would slip loose from heaven and find.

  A couple of red tops got into the act, too
.

  It took only a moment to see that Link Dierber was beyond mundane help. The rest were all breathing. The uninjured three stood around drooling like the smarts bandit had picked their brains clean.

  That old black magic.

  Schnook Avery would need some repairs but he would live. He needed something for the pain and swelling, plus a few dozen stitches. No bones poked through his skin. Nothing was obviously broken. He offered no work for the bone setters or cast makers.

  Shadowslinger still hadn’t been able to get onto her feet. She might be hurt worse than I first thought.

  Algarda said, “We need a healer. Fast.” He grabbed a red cap. “You. Take this?”

  Furious Tide of Light interrupted. “I'll go. I'll be faster.”

  Father considered daughter. “Are you sure?”

  “I can do it.”

  “All right. Be careful.”

  “I promise.”

  She floated up. Her soles cleared our heads. She drifted eastward, rising, gathering speed. Her legs worked, taking giant strides. She vanished in half a minute.

  I’d seen something similar before. But I remained as slack-jawed as everyone else.

  Algarda muttered, “Where did she find the nerve?” Then he looked at me, oddly. “She’s been acting strange all day.”

  Tinnie pushed through the crowd. She had an odd expression of her own. But she wasn’t watching the Windwalker. Or me. She was fixed on the bloody two-by-six, lying between Shadowslinger and what was left of Link Dierber. The watermills of her mind were turning.

  I began shivering. The excitement had worn off. And a breeze had come up. It swirled and shifted, playing among the buildings. It brought a whiff of potent body odor. As always, I saw nothing when I looked for the source.

  Barate Algarda observed, “Let’s not move anybody before the healer gets here. We might do more damage. Schnook. That means you should stay in one place and don’t move.”

  Poor kid Slump. He was the only member of the Faction who hadn’t run for it. He couldn’t make up his mind what to do now. Hang with Avery? Cry over Dierber? Schnook made up his mind by grabbing hold and not letting him get near Dierber.

  Dierber was alive, after all. But he wasn’t going to last.

  I nodded, told Algarda, “Good thinking.” I’d seen that often enough during the war. “Where did you do your five?”

  73

  Furious Tide of Light returned in less than fifteen minutes. Like a proper witch, riding a broomstick.

  But I was wrong about the broomstick. It was a coat tree. She had somebody behind her, a Hill type big on visual drama. This one loved black, starting with a vast hooded cloak that fluttered and flapped as the Windwalker hurtled toward us. Inside the hood was a bleached-bone mask holed for eyes, nose, and mouth.

  What did it take to bring someone like this out, with complete kit? Black bags dangled from the foot of the coat tree.

  The newcomer dismounted stylishly. He, or she, took the black bags off the coat tree. Furious Tide of Light settled to the pavements, dismounted, set the coat tree upright. It wobbled on uneven cobblestones.

  The newcomer considered the injured. Triage with non-medical judgments included. Who got helped first would be whoever had offended the healer least.

  The Windwalker floated over to her father. She studied our surroundings intensely. She was looking for someone.

  Tinnie slipped in under my right arm. She was shaking. After a moment to just snuggle she began nudging me out of the press.

  I thought that might be because she’d noticed Colonel Block among the onlookers. Block seemed only vaguely interested in me. Like it was only to be expected that Garrett would be part of the furniture at a particularly grotesque crime scene.

  Satisfied that she could do so without being overheard, Tinnie whispered, “Garrett, it wasn’t a ghost that did that. What happened out here. I don’t know about what happened inside.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “It wasn’t the thing under the theater that attacked those people.”

  “I’m listening.” She had an interesting theory. And I had nothing.

  “It was that man you brought around. The one with the hots for Lindy.”

  “Bill? Belle Chimes?”

  “Whatever. Somebody called him the Bellman, too.”

  “You have my interest, Miss Tate. On more than the usual level.”

  “That’s refreshing. Finding out you can be something more than my boy toy.”

  “Can’t have you getting distracted from that, though.”

  She wasn’t in the mood for banter. I wasn’t, myself, except as a distraction from disaster.

  She said, “I'll bet everybody saw the same ghost come out after those people. What did you see?”

  I described it. And recalled thinking the ghost looked familiar.

  “Same here,” she said. “That was Chimes. If he was twenty.”

  “Damn! Sweetheart, you are on to something. Dierber and Avery were out to get him. He turned the tables.”

  Maybe Belle Chimes wasn’t the feeble bush necromancer he pretended. Maybe, when he was really stressed, he could regress his apparent age by decades, long enough to smash heads, crack bones, and get gone before anyone reacted.

  I replayed events in my head. They didn’t come together seamlessly but I convinced myself that Tinnie was right.

  Could we prove it?

  Should we care? Or even bother?

  Belle’s squabble with the Hill was a private matter.

  I had troubles of my own.

  I had to do some stuff, fast. Before Max and Gilbey decided that employing me created more problems than it cured.

  I took my case to Colonel Block.

  The good colonel grunted, with admirable timing. He was both curious and sympathetic. Until I finished. Then he asked, “And you expect me to care, why?”

  “What?” Startled. “That’s what you do.”

  “It’s hard for me to get excited about helping you do your job when you’re always determined to complicate mine.”

  Tinnie chuckled. “You know what they say about paybacks.”

  Ever-maturing me, I stifled a query as to whether she might not be a payback herself. I told Block, “I thought you’d be interested. Hill folk are involved.”

  “I’m disinterested on account of those folk. They’re all the time telling me to stay out of their business. This looks like an opportunity to give them what they want.”

  “Did I mention characters called the Bellman and Lurking Felhske?” I had, of course. “The Director hauled me in the other day because he thought I might tell him something about Felhske.” Just a little fib, for effect.

  “Deal has his own priorities.”

  Block was having fun. A twinkle in the corner of one eye betrayed him.

  Or maybe that twinkle was about him having gotten a good look at Furious Tide of Light. Who was sparking a few speculative twinkles, despite the situation.

  I told him, “If you sniff the breeze you can catch an occasional Felhske whiff.”

  While Block mused, “I’ve heard so much about her. First time I’ve seen her. Looks just like her mother.”

  Um, a little charge of nostalgia? Was there a history?

  Could be. Barate Algarda had a hard face on him all of a sudden and he was looking our way.

  Tinnie turned on some heat. Just enough to get Block’s attention. He knew what was going on but he couldn’t help himself. None of us can.

  It’s sorcery. It’s the blackest black magic.

  My gal. She’s got the magic in spades but doesn’t want to rule the world. Lucky world. She’s content to cloud men’s minds one mewling sack of sludge at a time.

  The good colonel seemed fascinated by Miss Tate’s hypothesis. The very hypothesis that I’d put forward just moments before.

  Tinnie closed with a fetching pout. Block set tin whistle to lips and tootled.

  Red caps came out of the brickwork. They s
prang out of the ground. They dropped from the sky. Westman Block allowed himself a smirk of satisfaction over my discombobulation.

  A few quick instructions and the Watchmen scattered. Except for the handful directly working the matter of the fallen and strewn sorcerers.

  I suggested, “You might want them to know that the Bellman can change his apparent age.”

  “Timely, Garrett. Very timely.”

  “Huh? What’s that mean?”

  “I didn’t stammer, stutter, or speak in tongues. As is your habit, you sat on a critical point till it was well past ripe.”

  Man, you hold out the teensiest bit on behalf of a client, once way back in the dawn of time, they hammer you about it till the sun goes cold. “Tit for tat, my old friend. I’ve got the scars and bruises to back my argument, too.”

  More than once the good folks at the Al-Khar had just plunked me into the deep soup to see how the broth flew.

  “As you say, old buddy. That was then. This is now.” Block worked his whistle magic again, using a different musical phrase. He was a bit more talented than the thing down under.

  Red caps materialized.

  Ah. Most were the same ones as before. So Block hadn’t thrown the entire herd into the stampede.

  After a few quick words the troops got busy pushing the neighborhood rubberneckers back.

  74

  I beckoned Saucerhead. And told one of Block’s thugs, “Let him through. He’s my chief security guy. Head. Round up your troops. You need to lock the place down before somebody gets a bright idea and tries to sneak in the back door.”

  Some of TunFaire’s bad boys are fast on the uptake, swift to seize the day, and stupid enough to go for a quick hit on a Weider property.

  Some did beat Tharpe into the World. Where, unfortunately, they ran into angry ghosts. Or the Bellman making his getaway.