Deadly Quicksilver Lies

65

I didn't take Saucerhead. I didn't need any help. I was just going to chat with a teenage girl.

I didn't take anybody but me because I sold myself the notion that Marengo North English was committed to an old-fashioned, rigidly fair way of doing things.

So I fooled myself. Eagerness to meet Emerald Jenn didn't take me anywhere near Marengo North English. The estate belonged to the character who had sent his pals to roust me, a fact I could have determined had I bothered to do a little homework before hitting the trail. One Elias Davenport owned The Tops. Elias Davenport thought Marengo North English was a candyass who was just pussyfooting around the human rights thing. Elias was ready to act.

I didn't listen when Slither told me who brought Emerald's invitation.

Getting onto the grounds of The Tops wasn't a problem. Managing a sit-down with Emerald was a little more trouble.

Silly me. I thought they'd let me see her, get me out of their hair, forget the whole thing. I had no idea they were out of control.

I figured it out, though.

The guys who smiled me through the manor gate shed their senses of humor when the gate chunked shut. Their eyes got mean. They kept on grinning, but the only part of the joke they wanted to share was the punchline. Kidney high.

The guys who'd visited my place ambled out of the shrubbery. Didn't look like their manners had improved.

They made me so nervous I hit them back first, shielded by the spell that put me out of focus to anybody trying to concentrate on me. Damn, that was a neat one! They hopped and flailed and swung and cussed and missed me like a bunch of drunks. Meanwhile, I was hard at work with my mystical head-knocker, scattering unconscious bodies. Davenport's gardeners were going to be busy picking up fertilizer for a while.

I amazed myself. But we're all capable of amazing behavior once we're adequately motivated.

The Davenport mansion couldn't be seen from the gate. I undertook an odyssey across vast expanses of manicured lawn, maneuvering between sculpted shrubs and trees. Almost got lost in a maze created from hedges. Gawked my way through an incredible formal flower garden, thinking half the people of the Bustee slum (every one a human) could've supported themselves farming that ground.

The Davenport place was enough to kindle revolutionary fervor in a stone. Something about it shrieked contempt for every race.

I didn't march up to the door and hazard the mercies of another Ichabod. Once I spied the main house I resorted to my old recon training. I sneaked and hustled and lurked and tiptoed till I got to the rear of the house. There were plenty of people around and plenty saw me, but they were cringing characters wearing tattered Venageti military apparel. They were employed at such socially useful tasks as trimming grass with scissors. They pretended blindness. I returned the favor, didn't see their humiliation.

Never had I thought prisoners of war might be reduced to this. Not that I had any love for the Venageti. You got people chasing you through the swamps, trying to kill you, making you eat snakes and bugs to stay alive, you won't develop much sympathy if they stumble later. Still, there was an essential wrongness about their situation. And the core of it, I suspected, was that Elias Davenport wouldn't distinguish between vanquished foes and the "lower orders" of Karentines.

Elias must have had him a cushy desk mission far from the fighting back when he was serving his kingdom. Most ruling-class types get out to the killing grounds and discover that when they're cut they bleed the same as any farmboy or kid from the Bustee. "Sharp steel don't got no respect," one of my sergeants used to say, wearing a big-ass grin.

I found a back door that wasn't locked or guarded. Why bother? Who was going to do a break-in in this loony nest? Who would dare discomfit Elias Davenport?

(The name was a cipher to me at that point.)

I don't mind folks being stinking rich. I'd like to get there someday myself, have me a little hundred-room shack on a thousand acres well stocked with hot and cold running redheads and maybe a pipeline direct from Weider's brewery. But I expect everybody to get there the same way I would: by busting their butts, not by burying some ancestor, then raising their noses.

I know. It's a simpleminded outlook. I'm a simple guy. Work as hard as I need to, look out for my friends, do a little good here and there. Try not to hurt anybody needlessly.

That house was a house of pain. You couldn't help feeling that as soon as you stepped inside. Sorrow and hurt were in its bones. The house now shaped its inhabitants as much as they shaped it.

You find houses like that, old places possessed of their own souls, good or evil, happy or sad.

This was a house possessed by disturbing silence.

It should have had its own heartbeat, like a living thing, echoing comings and goings, creaking and rattling and thumping with the slamming of distant doors. But there were no sounds. The house seemed as empty as a discarded shoe—or Maggie Jenn's place up on the Hill.

Spooky!

I started thinking trap. I mean, those guys had been ready at the gate. A minute stalling around while somebody ran to the house, supposedly for permission, then they were all over me.

Was I expected to get past them? Was I supposed to walk into... what?

I grinned.

Saucerhead says I think too much. Saucerhead is right. Once you commit, you'd better give up the what-ifs and soul-searchings, do your deed and scoot.

I moved into the silence carefully, wearing a renewed grin. If I ever name my jobs, this one would have to be the Case of the Burglar Who Was the Good Guy. I was sneaking into every place I came to.

Not that I wanted it that way. People made me.