Petty Pewter Gods

6

When you are in my racket—confidential investigations, lost stuff found, work that doesn't force me to take a real job—you expect to get knocked around sometimes. You don't get to like it, but you do catch on to the stages and etiquettes involved. Especially if you are the kind of dope who trails a girl you know wants to be followed, right into the perfect spot for an ambush. That kind of guy gets more than his share of lumps and deserves every one of them. I bet guys like Morley never get bopped on the noggin and tossed into mystery coaches.

Your first move after you start to stagger back toward the light—assuming you are clever enough not to do a lot of whimpering—is to pretend that you are not recovering. That way maybe you will learn something. Or maybe you can take them by surprise, whip up on them, and get away. Or maybe they will all be out to dinner and some genius will have forgotten to take the keys out of the door of your cell.

Or maybe you will just lie there puking your socks up because of a rocking concussion rolling your hangover.

"O what foul beasts these mortals be! Jorken! Fetch a mop!" The voice was stentorian, as though the speaker was some ham passion player who never ever stepped offstage.

A woman's voice added, "Bring an extra bucket. They leak at the other end as well."

Oh no. I already had a bath this week.

"Why me? How come, all of a sudden, I get stuck with scutwork?"

"Because you're the messenger," said a wind from the abyss, cold as a winter's grave. That had to be my buddy the faceless coachman.

I was confused. My natural state, some would say. But this was bizarre.

Maybe it was time to get up and meet the situation head-on. I gathered my corded muscles and heaved. Two fingers and a toe twitched. So I exercised my skill with colorful dialogue. "Rowrfabble! Gile stynbobly!" I was on a roll, but I didn't recognize the language I was speaking.

I cooled down fast when a load of icy water hit me.

"Freachious moumenpink!" Driven by a savage rage, I managed a full half pushup. "Snrubbing scuts!" Hey! Was that a real word?

Another bucket of water hit me hard enough to knock me off my hands and roll me over. A ragmop came out of the mist. It started swabbing. Somebody attached to the mop muttered while he worked. That was a dwarfish custom. But this beanpole was so tall he could only have been adopted.

There was something weird about the mopman. Beside the fact that he carried on several sides of a conversation all by himself. He had little pigeon wings growing out of his head where his ears ought to be. Also, you could sort of see through him whenever he moved in front of a bright light.

A really intense light blazed up. I managed to get into a sitting position but could not look up. That light was worse than sunshine on the brightest-ever morning after a two-kegger.

"Mr. Garrett."

I didn't lie about it. I didn't admit anything, either. I didn't react at all. I was busy trying not to make more work for that princely fellow with the mop. I succeeded. And I managed to get one hand clamped over my eyes. Somewhere way in the back of my head a little voice told me I should take this as a lesson in chemistry. Don't play with stuff that might blow up in your face. Like strange redheads.

I know. I know. All redheads are strange. But there is strange and strange.

A different woman said, "Ease up on the glow. You're blinding him." She had a voice of a type you never hear except from the women who haunt your fantasies. It was the voice of the lover you have been waiting for all these years.

Something was going on here.

The light faded till I could stand to open my eyes. It continued to wane till there was no more than you would find in your average torchlit dungeon, which was my first guess as to my whereabouts. But I didn't recognize any voices. I thought I pretty well knew everybody who had a dungeon in the family inventory.

Well, it's a big city.

Hell. No. Not a dungeon. This was some kind of big cellar with a high ceiling and only a couple of really dirty windows practically lost in rusty steel bars, way, way up at the back. The cellar was mostly empty except for pillars supporting the structure overhead. The floor was old stone, a dark slate-gray. Hard as a rock, hard on a sleeper's back.

I took inventory. I didn't have any bits missing or any open wounds. My headache had not abated, though. My main injury was a knot on my conk from my attempt to dive through that coach door.

And I still had a hangover.

Maybe they turned down the lights too far. Now I could see my captors. All eight of them. I would rather not have.

There was a long drink of water who maybe used to be a pigeon, your basic roof rat, leaning on his mop. There were the three characters I had met already, all looking bigger and uglier than ever. Those guys could get work as gargoyles at any of the major cathedrals. Then there were three females. None was my redhead. The closest to her was a brunette with a paler skin and eyes that were smouldering pits of promise and curves that had been drawn by a dreaming celestial geometrician. Her lips made me want to bounce up and run over there. Presumably she owned the sexy voice.

Next to her was a gal with the biggest hair I have ever seen. What looked like snakes seemed to peek out. Her skin was a sort of pale pus-green color. Her lips were gorgeously tasty but dark green. When she smiled she showed you sharp vampire teeth. Not to mention that she sported two extra arms, the better to whatever you with. I decided I would put off asking her out.

She stared at me with a heat—or a hunger—that set those old frozen-toed mice to rambling along my spine.

The third woman was a giant of a blonde, maybe ten feet tall and at least that many years past her prime. She had put on weight where women generally do not need much, and overall she projected a sort of middle-class goodwifely dowdiness—with a suggestion of all the hidden bitterness that so often goes with that.

A guy I took to be her old man sprawled on some sort of stone throne that was so chipped and crumbly it looked like it could collapse under his weight. He was a couple of feet taller than the blonde. He wasn't wearing much but a stripey leather loincloth that looked like it had been ripped off a saber-toothed tiger on the fly and nobody bothered to cure it. He was built like a muscle freak who had gone to seed. He could have lugged minotaurs on those shoulders in his prime.

His eyes were a blazing blue, almost as gorgeous as mine. His hair was white and there was a lot of it, flying out all around his head in tangles and spikes. His beard was white, too, and had not been trimmed in decades. Despite his lovely eyes he seemed to be bored or almost asleep.

Everybody stared at me like they expected me to do something clever. I did not have my cane nor my tap shoes, so I couldn't go into my dance routine. Those words that escaped my mouth still had no discernible meaning, so I could not sing. I reached deep into my trick bag for the last thing left.

I tried to stand up.

I made it! But to stay standing up I had to hang on to one of the ugly guys. This particular one lacked a forehead and had a mouth like a lamprey. I bet all the girls wanted to tongue-kiss him. His eyes were fish eyes, too, yellow and shadowy and covered by that milky membrane.

That popped up and down a couple of times, but otherwise he ignored me. I managed to croak, "Who are you people? What are you?"

Two of these characters could pass for giants and one for human, but the rest were not like anything I had ever seen on the streets of TunFaire. You spend any time at all out there, you will see members or virtually every sentient species, from pixies the size of your thumb to giants twenty feet tall. You will even see some horrors like the ratmen, who were created by sorcery run amok.

Maybe that was what we had here, fugitives from some cellar way up at the pinnacle of the Hill, where our magician masters live. Trouble was, for the last four generations most of them people had spent their lives in the Cantard, managing the war. None of them would have messed up this much.

Some things you could be sure of just by experience.

I sagged. My ugly buddy did not help. I hung on like a drowning man, gradually pulling myself back into our world. I had had practice climbing lampposts on nights when the weather had turned incredibly alcoholic. "I know you people can talk."

Speaking of talk, where was my curse, the feathered prince of gab, the Goddamn Parrot? He sure wasn't in this basement—unless he was dead. Even the Dead Man could not stop his beak from rattling here.

The big guy, who was pretty obviously the head weirdo, nodded to the guy who had feathers for ears. But Beanpole Man just looked at me and shrugged like he did not have a notion.

I muttered. "I have been kidnapped by morons."

Yeah. Right. And what did that say about the blinding intellect of the guy who got kidnapped?

Gravity would not leave me alone. I sagged yet again.

Maybe I should let go, fall back down, go to sleep, and eventually wake up again somewhere else, where all the nightmares had not yet wormed their ways into every human mind.

Et tu, Cthulhu? The world is full of crackpots, and who can you trust?