Petty Pewter Gods

27

I was bone-tired. I wasn't smart, but I was lucky. It was a quiet night. Everybody with a taste for trouble had gone to the riots. My own brush with those, I learned later, was little more than a glance off the fringes of a minor skirmish far from the center of conflict, where matters grew serious. The push and shove and shouting escalated into massacres when real weapons came out. Nonhuman shops got plundered by the hundred. Refugees and squatters got tormented and beaten too often to number.

The scary thing was, the men responsible were out of control now but were all trained soldiers and combat veterans. If they reclaimed military discipline and organization, TunFaire could witness some real bloodshed.

I wondered what Relway and the secret police were doing to stem the tide. Maybe nothing. Serious bloodshed might serve Relway's personal agenda.

Bad as I wanted to get home to my bed, I entered my neighborhood with care. The temptation to make myself invisible was almost overpowering. Instead, I took my mind back in time, again became the company wreck. "Wreck" was what the regular grunts called us recon types when we were stuck with an infantry outfit. Wrecks got lots of training in sneakery and the mental skills important to the recon mission. I retained the physical skills, but getting to that place in my mind where there was no uncertainty, no nervousness, no worry, no lack of self-discipline, eluded me. That was something you had to work on every day. I had been slacking for years. I felt all the things your master wreck is supposed to set aside.

But I was quiet. I was one with night and shadow, never mind that big moon up there. I was fluidity itself, illusion flowing over the faces of walls in silence of stone. I passed sober but sleeping ratmen and they stirred not a whisker as I ghosted through the alleyways they called home.

I jumped about nine feet high when a sudden weight plopped onto my shoulder, grabbed hold like the cold, clawed hand of something risen from the grave. Every damned time I start telling me how great I am doing.

I returned to earth without screaming, having realized that the clawed hand was two bird feet. Attached to those feet was the ugliest duckling that ever lived. This one couldn't even swim or honk like a swan.

It said, "Do not approach the house yet. There are watchers. They must be diverted. Do not move at all until I give you the word." The voice did belong to the Goddamn Parrot, but there was only one horrible possible source for its dialogue.

I froze, the sheer horror, the terrible implications, leaving me completely blind to the fact that my venture northward, which had cost me such pain coming back south, had not broken the stakeout around my place. "No!" I whined, envisioning a future wherein there was no escape, no safe place. "Tell me it isn't so." He would be able to nag me anywhere.

"Awk! Garrett?"

"I understand and obey, O babbling feather duster." He was doomed. He had to go. If he could be used to follow me around carping, his fate was sealed.

It was him or me or the nightmare. Him or me. Heh heh. Accidents happen, Morley. Terrible accidents. Every day.

"Garrett! Please respond."

I was so involved in scoping out Mr. Big's short future that I had forgotten to keep my eyes and ears open. But luck looked the other way. No evil happened. "I'm right here. Right under this stinking vulture."

"Do not talk that way. The creature could have feelings, too. Hurry home. This diversion will not last long."

"On my way, Old Bones." I could sell him into slavery. Plenty of big-time wizards wouldn't mind having a dead Loghyr on staff. Well, a tame one anyway. Maybe I could give him away. Anybody wanted him, they could just come by and haul him off. I was not going to endure having him looking over my shoulder and criticizing me all over town.