Wicked Bronze Ambition

70

Tara Chayne said, “Let’s take these beasts back to their stable. It’s practically on the way.”

“Suppose your sister isn’t in good enough shape to walk?”

“We can only hope. We’ll drag her. You grab one foot, I’ll grab the other, and we’ll both hope she’s wearing a skirt.” She faked a dreamy look. “And no bloomers.”

How much of that poison was real?

The Machtkess girls certainly had an eccentric love-hate thing going.

Singe fell in beside me. “I just had to get out of the house.”

“Huh?”

“It is getting stressful. I am not equipped to mother a human teenager, nor do I have the force of personality to manage an old man who refuses to act his age.”

“Problems with Penny?” I faked an anxious look around. “Actually, she’s pretty well grounded. Just don’t let her know I think that.”

“She is. Near as I can tell, being younger than her in actual years.”

There was that. Singe was a full adult rat person, but in universal time she was two years younger than Penny.

Her people grow up faster, living shorter, harder lives. Ninety percent have been dead awhile by the time they reach my age.

“Hey. How has it been with Vicious Min? I never even thought to check on her.”

“Dean handles her with help from Humility’s women. I have other things to do.”

Her distaste was plain.

I shrugged. “Whatever works.”

“Penny helps a lot, too.”

“Good for her. She’s finally making herself useful.” I was jabbering on semiautomatic. Something didn’t seem right. Brownie and the girls weren’t happy anymore, either. “Has His Nibs gotten anything out of her?”

“What he has gotten is frustration. He says something inside her keeps adjusting as he finds ways in, as soon as he begins to probe.”

We stopped briefly while an old-style Sisters of the Biting Oracle party, playing brass instruments, crossed an intersection in front of us. That took a while, not that they were deliberately holding up traffic. They were old. The youngest was Tara Chayne’s mother’s age-and she was strutting out in front of her grandparents.

Sons and grandsons helped carry the instruments.

Tara Chayne said, “I enjoyed their music more when I was Penny’s age.”

“The nuns probably enjoyed it more when you were Penny’s age, too. And that was wicked of you.”

She had attached the leather tracer from under my saddle blanket to an instrument case being lugged by the last grandson in line.

She might have been my kind of girl when she was Penny’s age, too. Unfortunately, back then I hadn’t been old enough to be born yet.

Singe and the dogs were sniffing the air now, and Dollar Dan’s head bobbed like a pigeon’s as he looked for something. Only Tara Chayne seemed at ease.

Then I spotted the gargoyles.

They were watching from atop a white limestone building up ahead. There were eight of them. Their heads bobbed the way Dollar Dan’s head was.

I told Moonblight, “That looks like more your expertise than mine.”

“What does?” Then she spotted the critters staring at us in apparent confusion. “I see.” She laughed.

“What?”

Neither Singe nor Dollar Dan got the joke, either.

“You thought they were demons, didn’t you? Real gargoyles, maybe? But they’re regular animals. We just don’t see them inside the wall anymore.”

Closer and looking from a steeper angle, I could see that she was right. Those were flying thunder lizards and yes, of a sort not seen inside the city lately. Other people were beginning to point and wonder, too.

The gargoyles seemed unhappy about being on the city stage.

We kept moving. They kept fidgeting, watching us in a way that left me sure that we were the reason that they had come to town.

Moonblight told me, “You are one lucky son of a bitch, Garrett.”

“It ain’t luck, it’s mad skills. What did I get right this time?”

“You lucked out. You caught that boy marking your horse. If you hadn’t spotted him and I hadn’t slapped that tag onto that baboon’s bassoon-”

“It was a two-reed flute.”

“-those monsters would be all over us now.”

I was getting my mojo back. Instead of screeching, tearing my hair, and refusing to believe her, I observed, “That would constitute a whole new angle on the art of murder.”

“Well. . Not really. But this might be the first time in your lifetime that anyone collected flying lizards and imprinted them with a target.”

For no rational reason I thought aloud, “The Black Orchid.”

“Not hardly.” Amused. “Orchidia is a hands-on girl. If she wants you dead you’ll be smelling the cognac on her breath when your lights go out. This was set up by somebody who wanted to be far away when the excitement started.”

“Me for sure?”

“Yours was the horse that got marked. Though I will stipulate that the kid might not have known it was your horse. And the baddies probably want anybody with you to go down, too. To ease the pressure later.”

I grunted. The boy probably figured that the smaller horse had to belong to the woman.

We were just yards from being directly in front of the limestone ugliness. The thunder lizards were three stories up, making noise enough to be heard a block away. Had they had any brains, you might have thought they were arguing about what to do.

A singleton squawked and flapped clumsily off toward the musical nuns.

You could still hear them playing, faintly.