Dread Brass Shadows

26

The longer we walked the more certain I became that I'd have to renegotiate with Winger. I glanced at her, big as me, strutting along like she dared the world to take its best shot. Something about her unjustified cockiness appealed to me Give her a dose of sense, she might be all right.

"Hey, Winger. That twenty isn't an open offer. I won't buy a pig in a poke. You got to deliver dwarves."

"No cat in this bag, Garrett. You'll get dwarves."

Cat and pig, both expressions come from an old country con. Once upon a time peasants took piglets to market in a ‘poke.' Some grifter got the idea of stuffing the bag with a cat and selling it to somebody gullible enough not to look inside before he handed over his money. So. Pig in a poke, cat out of the bag.

I wanted dwarves. I got them. But not exactly in mint condition.

"What's going on?" Winger muttered. People were milling around a tenement that had seen its best days a hundred years before I was born People who weren't interested in the ongoing airshow.

"Trouble," I told her. "Past tense Else we'd have a desert here."

"Ghouls9"

"You could say that."

She pushed through the crowd, not caring who she shoved or elbowed She was mad, perfectly willing to get in a fight. I wondered if I ought to be around somebody who had herself a war on with the whole world.

The first dead dwarf lay sprawled in the tenement entrance, hacked and stabbed and twisted up into an unnatural position. He clutched the hilt of a broken knife. "Got swamped in a rush, looks like," I said. "Anybody see it happen?" I'm a dreamer.

The nearest vultures looked at me like I was crazy. I shrugged, pushed inside. No crowd in there, which suggested the folks outside expected city busybodies any minute. People not worried about the Watch would have been inside collecting anything the dead couldn't use anymore.

The Watch seldom bothers doing much policing or chasing, but they do grab folks found on the scene, then make life miserable for them. I told Winger, "We'd better do this quick."

"Do what?" She sounded depressed. I supposed she was thinking about all the things she couldn't buy with the money I wasn't going to pay her.

"Look the place over. See what's to be seen."

"Why? All you're going to see is more dead guys."

She had a point. There was another on the first floor landing and three in the hallway on the second. Two of those may have been attackers. They were better kempt, better clad. Gnorst's bunch.

The fight had proceeded along the hallway, scourged a half-dozen sleeping rooms, and tumbled down a cramped rear stairwell. None of the rooms had doors. Most had been torn apart by somebody in a hurry looking for something. We found a ratman and a dwarf, both critically wounded and a lot of nothing else. I asked, "Was this the place you wanted to sell me?"

"Sure was." Still depressed.

"You tried."

"That don't put money in my pocket. What's that racket?" She meant the yelling out front.

"Watch must be coming. People telling each other to make themselves invisible. Which isn't such a bad idea." I stomped down the back stairway. Behind me, Winger muttered about her luck couldn't turn worse if she prayed. Her vocabulary wasn't unique or imaginative, but it was colorful.

The back way out featured a broken door. I squeezed through. The mess beyond suggested somebody tried to hold Gnorst's dwarves there while the renegades made their getaway. One of Gnorst's dwarves lay partially buried in litter, alive enough to groan. I tried asking him questions. If he spoke any Karentine, he was too involved in his own misery to respond. He did manage one dwarfish outburst filled with fireworks, the only word of which I caught was "ogre." I told Winger, "This one will be all right. If the Watch don't lynch him just to make believe they're doing something useful."

"I think they're in the building." There was a racket inside.

"Time to go Watch your step." TunFaire's alleys serve many unplanned uses, especially those of trash dump and public relief facility. The quality of cleanup attention they get from the city ratmen declines as one moves farther from the Hill. What the lords don't see don't exist. We were far from the hub of the wheel here, in a stretch so foul it boasted no homeless tenants.

A Watchman stepped into our path as we approached the street. Being a naturally courteous kind of guy, I'd let Winger go first The Watchman was about five six and tricked out in those gaudy blues and reds, a pretty little devil who got him a nasty grin when he saw he had somebody boxed. He started to say something.

What did he want to say? Who the hell knows9 Winger grabbed him by the throat, planted one on his nose, hoisted him up, and flipped him into the mess behind us. Like he weighed about six pounds. I wanted to gawk but knew it wouldn't work. He had friends. "Bright move, Winger. Real bright." I hoped he hadn't seen me well enough to know me if we met again.

I put the old heels and toes to work doing what the gods intended and didn't slow down till I was ten blocks away. Huffing, puffing, snorting like a bilious dragon, I looked for Winger. Not a sign of her. She'd gone her own way. Which was maybe an excellent idea and one I ought to hope she'd pursue indefinitely. A guy could get hurt hanging around with people like her.