Cruel Zinc Melodies

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 avolkswanderung . 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.