Faded Steel Heat

54

"Took you long enough," Relway grumbled. He didn't look much like the Relway I'd left though the changes were cosmetic and subtle. He'd acquired a drooping shoulder and a slight dragging limp, a lisp and a marked preference for shadows. I doubted even Morley would recognize him later, changed and in a different light. The runt even smelled different. The ratpeople wouldn't recognize him later, either.

"Took a while to set it up."

"In the middle of the night?"

"I got the best."

Relway eyed the ratpeople. They were sniffing around and muttering. All the violence upset them. "The best is Pular Singe."

"That's her. You know her?"

"Only by reputation."

Good for Morley and Reliance. Maybe not so good for me. Now I might actually find Belinda fast, which could mean a big fight with TunFaire's two ugliest bad boys.

They would be like wounded animals, even nastier now they were hurt. Like cornered rats. Snicker.

Crask and Sadler were like a malevolent force of nature, beyond control, subject only to laws they created themselves.

I gave the ratgirl another reassuring wink. That seemed to calm her. She responded with the wedge-toothed grimace her kind thinks constitutes a smile.

There's a certain pathos to the ratpeople. Most of them desperately want to be just like the race that created them. Poor deluded beasts.

Trackers amaze me. Singe amazed me doubly. And she wasn't full-grown. She was going to be a legend. Once on the trail she was limited only by her ability to walk fast and mine to keep up. Fenibro kept giving me the ratman equivalent of a big shit-eating grin. You'd have thought he was running the trail. Pular Singe kept looking to me for approval. Boy, did I give her plenty. Evidently she didn't get much at home. Ratmen don't treat their young or females well.

Everybody needs somebody to look down on and treat bad. You wonder who's left for the young ratwomen, though.

Later I grumbled, "These guys must be headed for the arctic." We had covered several miles, leaving downtown's seething heart for a neighborhood called the Plain of Cavalry. Centuries ago, when the citizen militia was TunFaire's only army, the mounted troops assembled there to practice up for scrimmages with neighboring city-states. In those days the plain was outside the wall. Later the wall was extended to enclose the plain so it could be used as a bivouac in times of siege. They started burying dead soldiers there. Eventually it became a vast graveyard. It's not much used anymore. It's become the object of endless dispute. Those who want to build there insist that land inside the wall is too precious to waste on dead folks already forgotten by their own descendants. The descendants disagree. The traditional position has prevailed only because many of the dead are old-time heroes and imperials. But adequate bribes might silence the opposition.

The cemetery is a bivouac again, filled with shanties and crude tents slapped together by refugees. This isn't popular with the neighbors, who have to suffer more than their share of victimizations. The Call is popular around the plain.

Wary tension filled the cemetery air. There was very little light. There's no free fuel to be had anymore. I was uneasy because I hadn't thought to bring a lantern. The moon wasn't much help—though it gave Singe all the light she needed.

Squatter villages appear wherever there's open ground. They're unclean. They stink. It's only a matter of time till some plague gets started. It can't be long before the street conflicts engulf the camps.

"Hold up," I told Pular Singe. I gestured, too. She stopped, waited, watched me with a disquieting intelligence. I suspected her hearing problem was less severe than Reliance thought, more a convenience than a handicap. She got my deaf-and-dumb sign language right away, too, though I was rusty. It was a shame Singe had trouble with the common speech. I got the impression she had a real sense of humor.

She had to be some kind of mutant.

"Morley, wouldn't this pest-hole camp be perfect to disappear in?"

People were moving around us, despite the hour, looking for nothing they could have articulated if asked. Movement itself was the destination.

The squatter population was a volatile mix including every type of refugee. I saw people so exotic they had to be weird to themselves.

"Absolutely," Morley said. "You'd have to be a woolly mammoth to get noticed around here."

"Is the tracking getting harder?" I asked Singe.

She shook her head, a human thing, not natural for ratpeople. Pular Singe tried hard to emulate human ways.

Fenibro told me, "It is difficult but she can single it out."

"She's amazing."

"She is. There is blood in it still."

No blood had been visible for miles.

I observed, "She sure says a lot with a headshake."

Morley murmured, "The boyfriend likes to show off his talent, too."

"Which is?"

"Human speech."

"Oh. Think we're being led?"

"You asking me if I think Crask and Sadler grabbed Belinda hoping that you, personally, would try to rescue her?"

"It's possible, isn't it? They might even have counted on you coming with me."

"I might calculate a scheme like that, Garrett. Not those two. They aren't complicated thinkers. They saw a chance to grab Belinda. They grabbed her. They probably expected you to be with her. Things didn't go the way they anticipated."

Yeah? How did they know where to find Belinda? How did they know who she was supposed to be with? "You think they expect to be trailed here?" Morley wasn't giving Crask and Sadler enough credit. They weren't just mountains of muscle. They had brains. That's what made them scary.

"Once they have time to think. They left a heavy trail. But they shouldn't expect trouble this soon."

I glanced around. As a group we presented an unusual look but out there the unusual was the norm—and inquisitive noses tended to get broken. "Figure Relway had us followed?"

"Is the moon made of green cheese?"

"That's what I thought." The tail wasn't obvious, though. "Go ahead, Singe. You're doing wonderfully. But please be careful."

Fenibro looked at me like I wanted to teach granny to suck eggs. But Pular Singe practically purred. Whereupon Fenibro suffered a case of the sullens.