Red Iron Nights

27

"Your dream came true," I told Dean when he let us in. "I'm employed. You'd better be more careful what you wish for."

"Is it that bad?"

"Worse. Go wake up the Dead Man."

"What about supper? Everything is overdone now." He almost whined. He's proud of his cooking.

"If you'd seen what I did, you wouldn't want to eat either."

"Oh. Then I'll have to get everything off the stove and put away right away." Thus he evaded having to deal with the Dead Man. He has a real talent for getting out of things by having something else to do that has to get done first.

I told Block, "We may have to light a fire under him. I think he's only been asleep about a week. Sometimes these spells last for months. Dean. Since you don't want to handle His Nibs, you get to go get Morley." That would fix him. He was less comfortable at Morley's place than in the Dead Man's room.

The brave Captain Block endured our juvenile maneuvers without comment. Maybe there was a human being in there. Maybe I could grow to like the guy, incompetence and all.

I led the way, storming the ramparts. Or whatever.

I hadn't been into the Dead Man's room since well before his nap began. Things had changed.

"Gods!" Block swore.

I made an inarticulate sound something like a squeal.

The place was full of bugs. Big bugs, little bugs, enough bugs to carry the Dead Man away if they got into teamwork. And I knew who was to blame.

The fat stiff had worked a deal with Saucerhead behind my back. The real question was, how had he worked it so the creepy-crawlies hadn't gotten into the rest of the house to give his scheme away? I muttered, "I hope you're enjoying your dreams about the Cantard." Despite my efforts, chitin crunched underfoot.

"What is this?" Block asked.

"He collects bugs. Believe it or not. And doesn't bother to get rid of them when he's done playing with them. Now I'll have to use sulfur candles again. I hate it when I have to do that." I wondered if Dean had been in on the deal. Probably. That would explain the absence of the cat. He'd know I'd start exterminating as soon as I found out. No cat would survive a thorough sulfur-candle job.

I started considering doing a sulfur-candle job on myself. It had been half an hour.

"He dead?" Block asked. "Like for good?" His Nibs hadn't twitched a mental muscle.

"No. Just napping. Really. He picks his times for when it's most inopportune."

"How come?"

I shrugged. "These things happen to me."

"What do you do?"

"Fuss and fume and threaten to light a fire under him. Scream and yell and run in circles."

"What if that don't work?"

"Then I muddle through on my own." I started loosening up to do my screaming and circling. I'd exhausted fuss and fume and threaten.

Block started wadding scrap paper from a trash box nobody had emptied in an epoch. He tossed the wads under the Dead Man's chair. I got attentive. "What're you doing?" My money was under there. I hoped he hadn't noticed.

"Going to start that fire you mentioned."

"Hell, you got balls after all." I talked about it but never seriously considered doing it. I leaned against the doorframe, watched. This could get interesting.

The bugs started getting excited—more excited than they usually do when someone is stomping around. I began to suspect that my partner wasn't as far away as he'd like me to think.

Block grabbed a lamp.

Damn. He was going to go for it. All the way. I wouldn't interfere in it for anything. Grinning, I observed, "I figure the fire will get his attention before it's big enough to be a threat to the house. After four hundred years he's pretty dried out. Ever hear about how when the Dewife invaded Polkta they couldn't find enough wood to heat their stills—no trees in Polkta—so they dragged old mummies out of the ancient Polktan tombs and burned them instead?"

Block paused. "Really?" He had a big dopey frown on.

"Really. A body dries out for a few hundred years, it'll burn. Not great, but good enough so you don't have to do without your liquor."

"Oh." Block didn't care about curiosa. In fact, he was baffled. What did this have to do with a bunch of drunken barbarian tomb robbers in a faraway land a hundred years ago?

I had to wonder about the man. And my cherished notions about the Watch. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe they weren't all bone-lazy and graft-bitten. Maybe some were well-meaning—like Block most of the time—but were too stupid to handle their jobs.

Block squatted to shove the lamp under the Dead Man's chair.

Call him off, Garrett.

"It lives! Hang in there, Captain. I'm starting to get something."

Garrett!

"Take a peek inside a head or two, Old Bones. We've got a problem."

Block froze, flame a foot from the wastepaper, eyes a hair too high to spot my stash.

I have called you a curse upon my waning years, Garrett. I have been too kind. Many a time have I been tempted to terminate our association. I should have yielded. You are rude, pushy, thoughtless, uncouth. Only a certain crude charm shields you.

"My mother loved me. But what did she know, eh?"

I could spend hours cataloging your shortcomings. But this is not the time.

"You've done it often enough that I know them by heart anyway."

Excellent. You do have your redeeming virtues.

First time I'd heard that from him. Tinnie and Maya and one or twelve other ladies had mentioned an occasional virtue and a more-than-occasional failing, but—

Including an all-consuming laziness. However, this once, you were correct to disturb me.

"Gods, you can carry me away. I've seen it all now."

Your manners are deplorable. You might have found a more civil means of obtaining my attention. But your assessment is correct. You cannot handle this without my assistance.

Smug character, eh? I signaled Block to back off. "He's awake." I breathed easier with the Watchman away from the household fortune.

I feared it would come to this. The hints were there. But I allowed your success on the Hill, come so swift and with such apparent finality, to deceive me. Because I wanted it to be true. Yes. Even master realists such as myself may, in a lifetime, succumb occasionally to wishful thinking. The mind and the heart naturally eschew horror.

Brag about your failures loudly, longly, humbly, and you can make a virtue of them. Make it look like you're a regular guy. I asked, "How come I get the feeling you weren't asleep at all, you were just rehearsing? Cut the aw-shucks comedy, Chuckles. Girls are dying right on schedule. They shouldn't be. You talked to everybody who had anything to do with the others. Did you get anything? Give us an angle. Tell us how to stop this thing for good."

That may not be possible. Not in the sense you mean. If it is what I feared at first glimpse. Captain Block, I need to know about that man you took from the Bustee. Garrett, I want to know about those ritual knives.

I felt him digging into my mind, deeper than usual. Presumably he was doing the same to Block at the same time. Block's eyes got huge. In my case I felt him digging after things I hadn't noticed noticing at the site of the most recent murder.

It's neither fun nor comfortable having somebody prowl through your head. I hate it. You'd hate it too. There are things in there that nobody ought to know. But I didn't shut him out.

I can do that—if I work at it hard enough.

He surprised me. Butterflies?

"Yes. So?"

Three times now, butterflies. This is a new twist. Though no one has mentioned butterflies in connection with any of the victims you did not see yourself, I feel that we are dealing with a single killer.

"No shit?" I couldn't see there being a bunch of guys all getting the same idea: hey, wouldn't it be neat if I found me a pretty young brunette and strung her up and bled her and cut her guts out?

Indeed, Garrett. Absolutely. One particularly interesting fact that emerged from my interview series was that the blond young lady, Tania Fahkien, was not a natural blond. In fact, the state of blondness had befallen her only hours before her demise.

"Are any of them natural blonds? Not many, in my experience."

Just so. The point is, the coloring of the victims is worth pursuit.

Even Block had gotten that far. I said so.

Of course. But we forgot that in our excitement over having brought the killer to ruin. Correct?

"The details do seem inconsequential when you've got your bad guy nailed down and everything wrapped. You said you feared this. Did you have some idea what was going on before I spoiled everything by getting lucky but not as lucky as I thought?"

Yes. As you suspect, these sorts of murders have come around before. I know of three previous series, though without any direct knowledge of the first two outbreaks. Those occurred while I was still among the ambulatory, surrounded by a people whose foibles and tribulations were, at best, of marginal and academic interest. The victim types and killing methods were similar, but insofar as I recall, there were no butterflies.

"So maybe nobody noticed. You don't see what you're not looking for." But Block's one man had.

Perhaps. There was no reason to look for butterflies. Though, as I noted, I was not that interested in those outbreaks —other than as behavioral curiosities amongst the unwashed and ignorant latecoming barbarian, a creature capable of firing his distilleries with the remains of his dead.

He does like to get his needles in. "All right. You know something. You said you feared this. How about you get to the point before all the brunettes in town are lost to us? I confess to a personal penchant for redheads, but brunettes are a valuable resource in their own right."

Horrors out of olden times, Garrett.

"It's happened before. Right? Surprise me a surprise. Fact me a fact."

I was never involved with those prior cycles. Yet they were dramatic enough to stick in mind, though with few useful details.

"I can see that." I was getting exasperated. And he was enjoying that. "How about remembering what you can remember?"

He sighed mentally but forged boldly into new territory by ignoring my impatience. Then, as now, the victims fell into a narrow range of physical characteristics. They were female, young, brunette, attractive by human standards, with very similar features. In fact, facial similarities seemed more important that height or weight.

The faces of many women flickered through my mind, as he had reconstructed them from his interviews and ancient recollections. None were related, but all could have passed as sisters. All had faces much like that of Chodo's daughter—if not as pale—and wore their hair as she had when I'd run into her at Hullar's...

Hey. For the first time I realized that she'd worn her hair differently there. That she'd had a full head of hair, hanging long, not the helmet I'd seen at Morley's place.

Hairstyle could be a key. The Dead Man produced several notions of styles from olden times. The faces and figures remained vague, but the hairstyles were identical with that worn by Chodo's daughter at Hullar's. All the recently departed had had bushels of hair.

"So maybe we got us an unhappy hairdresser," Block said. "Stalking down the corridors of history, eliminating the gauche and passé." The man had a sense of humor after all. Weird, but he had one.

I said, "This mess is getting kind of spooky, Smiley." And I wasn't alone in thinking so. Despite his flirtation with levity, Block was green around the gills.

There is sorcery in it, Garrett. Grim, gruesome, ancient, and evil sorcery. Necromancy of the darkest form. Dead men who have gone to the crematorium do not rise up and resume their atrocities.

"Really?" What genius. "Hell, I figured that out." I'm not a detective for nothing. Deductive reasoning. Or was it inductive? I can never keep those two straight.

There is a curse at work. If this outbreak is indeed connected with those that went before, it is a very potent curse. In those cases, when the guilty parties were apprehended and executed, the killings stopped.

"But did start up again later."

Eventually. Apparently. After generations.

"They started up again right away this time," Block said.

This was the first time the guilty party was caught quickly. This was the first time without a trial and execution. This was the first time the guilty party was cremated.

"What's that got to do with anything?" Block demanded. He was into the thing now. In fact, he was back over by that lamp looking like he was thinking about starting a fire just to make the Dead Man get on with it.

He wasn't as dumb as he pretended.

As I recollect, the earlier killers were caught, tried, convicted, and hanged. Two were hanged. I believe the first was beheaded. Beheading was the punishment in fashion then. In each case the remains went into unmarked graves.

Executed criminals still go into unmarked graves. That's part of the punishment. "And?" I asked.

"So?" from Block.

Garrett, Garrett, must you be so determinedly thick of wit? I have given you everything you need. Use your brain for something more than landfill that keeps your ears from clacking together.

The same old challenge. Use my gods-given mind and talents to figure it out for myself. He's no fun at all. But he thinks he's bringing me up right.

Block grabbed the lamp and headed for the Dead Man's chair.

I waved him off. "He's right. Sort of. He's given us what we need. Anyway, if you bully him, he gets stubborn. It's a pride thing. He'll let you burn him and the house both before he'll give you a straighter answer."

Block eyeballed me a moment before he decided I was telling it straight. "A goddamned oracle, eh?" He put the lamp back where it belonged. "So what's he talking about? Where's our point of attack?"

I didn't have the foggiest. All I knew was that the Dead Man had seen some fog, and if he had, then it was right there in front of my face.

Of course, you not being in the middle of it, stressed out and confused and still smelling the stink of a girl who died in terror, you have it all scoped out and you're telling yourself that Garrett, he's too dumb to be believed.