Angry Lead Skies

63

Dean brought food and drink to the Dead Man's room. He seemed to have adjusted to the extended presence of guests. He and Singe, in particular, seemed to have achieved a sound accommodation.

After relating my extensive adventures I asked the Dead Man, "Have you been able to learn anything from our elven guests?"

A great deal. Beginning with the obvious fact that they are not actually elves, nor are they members of any similar or familiar species. Nor are they a mixture of familiar species. Nothing that I have learned, by the way, was provided to me voluntarily. They suspect, but do not yet know, that they have revealed a great deal about themselves and their kind. This one knows herself as Evas, which is the diminutive for something even I cannot fathom. The other is Fasfir and was the captain of their party of three. They have much more complex interior lives than human beings, yet seem to envy your emotional freedoms. Fasfir, curiously, seems to have a rudimentary sense of humor.

"All right. Your talents are mighty and your cleverness surpasses anything the world has ever seen. What do we know now that we didn't know yesterday?"

We now know that Casey is what he claims to be, an officer of their law sent here a year ago to arrest Lastyr and Noodiss. Insofar as I can decipher the images in Evas' mind, which is much easier to penetrate than is Fasfir's, those two are religious missionaries originally sent out by an outlaw cult known as the Brotherhood of Light. Proselytization is a major crime under the laws of these people. Casey is supposed to arrest them, simply for their intent to proselytize.

They stole the skyship they used to come here. They were not skilled in its operation. They crashed it into the river. Their motives for teaching Kip to invent things have to do with wanting him to create things that have to exist before they can begin to make the tools that they will need to fix their ship.

Which takes them into another entire realm of crime entirely, apparently. That of revealing the secrets of state sorcery. Another department sent out Evas and her companions to seize Lastyr and Noodiss for betraying sorcerous secrets, the fact of those crimes having been included in Casey's reports, which somehow leaked over to the competing bureau.

"If they needed a ship why didn't they just go down to the waterfront and hire one?"

Evidently the journey is too long to make in a normal sailing ship, which supposedly cannot travel fast enough to make it to their country in even a Loghyr's lifetime.

"Wow." What else could I say? I've always known that the world is bigger than what I've experienced in my thirty years, but distances on that scale are beyond my comprehension. "And what about the elves from the flying disk? Who are they? Still more cops?"

They appear to be something resembling a sorcerer who, though he spends his whole lifetime studying magic and discovering new things about it, never does anything more practical with his discoveries than just write the information down. They are members of a fraternity where the search for knowledge is an end in itself. The excitement about Lastyr and Noodiss alerted them to the existence of Karenta and TunFaire, so they assembled an expedition to come study us. Apparently they wanted to grab Kip Prose because their ship is suffering its own problems and they thought that if they could open communications with Lastyr and Noodiss, working together they could produce one working vessel from the two cripples.

I do stumble into the weird stuff. And you can't get much weirder than this.

These last four may also have been doing commercial surveys of some sort, as a condition of gaining financial support for their research. At least one of them may be a ringer who really works for a law enforcement bureau that somehow oversees commerce. Fasfir holds all four in complete contempt. At the same time she is convinced that they are her crew's only chance of ever getting home. If their aerial ship can be made capable of completing one more long voyage, Fasfir sees two ways of accomplishing that. One calls for an improbable amount of good luck making repairs to the one aerial ship you saw up close in the wine country. The other requires that she and her friends find Lastyr and Noodiss so that their wrecked flying ship can be cannibalized to make repairs to the other. Fasfir is much more knowledgeable than is Evas, who seems to be the junior member of the mission.

The creature Casey will have a ship of his own hidden somewhere, of course. There is a general consensus that he will rescue no one but himself. He feels no responsibility for the others. But he will take Lastyr and Noodiss back as prisoners. And Fasfir is afraid that those two might be ready to surrender. They came here to save Karentine souls and teach Karentines forbidden magics that would make their lives easier but after a year of exposure to our savage ways, she fears, even those two have to have become convinced that we deserve our damnation.

"Not exactly original thinking there." A quick visit to the Chancery steps will expose you to all the outrage against the moral destitution of our times that you can possibly stand. Most of us are so poverty-stricken morally that we don't realize that we're missing something. According to the rant-and-ravers.

It was unoriginal when I was a stripling. It is a long slide indeed that never reaches bottom.

"You ever find any way to communicate with them directly?"

I have not yet given the matter much consideration. However, and despite any pretense to the contrary, this one understands spoken Karentine perfectly. They have a sorcery which allows them to learn very quickly.

Meaning she was tracking my part of the conversation.

Exactly.

"Ouch. But is there any solid reason for us to hide?"

Evas stood motionless, regarding me with those huge, unblinking eyes, possibly trying to see inside me, to the place where I was listening to the Dead Man. I wondered if she was having any success. I conjured a vivid erotic vision of the two of us rather energetically being boys and girls together. The Dead Man made his disgust known immediately. The silver elf did not, though by happenstance there was a huge crash in the kitchen.

I did get a somewhat puzzled look from Singe, which confirmed my suspicion that she might be slightly sensitive herself.

Very slightly. For which be grateful. Had she viewed that image we might be dealing with hysteria all over again.

"You know, I still ache all over anytime I sit still for very long. I don't want to be a detective anymore today. And when I get up tomorrow I just want to be an accountant trying to figure out how to make sure we get paid for all of this. Can they read and write?"

I do not know. And now I can no longer see inside Evas' head without hammering my way in. For some reason she has begun to suspect that someone here might be able to read her mind. You would not have any notion why she might suspect that, would you?

I shrugged. It didn't seem likely, did it?

I'm not usually much concerned about money—as long as I've got some. I was growing concerned because of this mess, though. We were spending and spending and spending to hire help and buy food and there seemed to be an ever smaller likelihood of us managing any return on investment. Kip was back home with his family. The silver elves seemed to have lost interest in him. After the country confrontation, they all knew that he couldn't finger Lastyr and Noodiss.

But Old Bones was having him one hell of a good time, I could tell. This thing was the most fun he'd had in years. It was something new. These two weird women, Evas and Fasfir, were, to him, as exciting and alluring as was my friend Katie to me.

I said, "This's the least violent, least traditional thing we've ever been into. I'm not comfortable with it at all. The stakes are trivial and these silver elves are too alien for me to find very interesting."

Perhaps you will feel differently in the morning. Try considering the stakes from a viewpoint not your own. I will be doing that myself now that I have the mind time free. One obvious avenue of exploration is the possible dangers the Lords of the Hill fear.

"Those old paranoids are only scared because they think the whole world is infested with people as cruel and wicked and mean-spirited as they are."

True. But that does not render them automatically wrong in every instance. They can be afraid in a huge way because it is possible for them to have huge enemies to make life terrible, not just for them but for us all. Just one of these silver elves needs to be wicked and willing to use their weird but powerful sorcery against us.

He was right about that. Those people controlled some very strange powers.

He was right about me feeling differently in the morning, too—for reasons entirely unrelated to any remotely within his consideration at the time.