Book 10 - Angry Lead Skies Read Free Page B

kind of
imagination. But this’s exactly the way he got when those
elves came looking for him.”
    “Elves? What elves? Are we suddenly starting to get
somewhere?”
    “No. I just feel more comfortable calling them elves. Say
they were elf-sized but they weren’t like any elves that we
know. They were female. You ever see a female elf who didn’t
look like the devil’s disciple?”
    Not my choice of descriptives but I knew what he meant. Even the
ugly elf girls are pretty enough and wicked enough to melt your
spine with a wink and a smile and a wiggle if the fancy takes them.
“No. Never have.”
    “These girls . . . weren’t. They
were almost asexual.”
    “How did you know?”
    Garrett! I do not enjoy such an oversufficiency of
mind-space that I can waste any following your digressions. Save
that for later. The creature is in the alley. It is confused. It
can be captured. Will you please see to that and cease this passing
the time of day with Mr. Playmate?
    “Play, my sedentary sidekick tells me one of your elves is
skulking around in the alley out back. Why don’t we go invite
him to the party? We can smack him around a little to break his
concentration. Old Bones can ransack his mind while he’s
distracted. Which means I’ll be able to find out what
this’s all about and you’ll find out if there’s
any real reason for you to worry.”
    Damn! That wasn’t the best word to use. Playmate worries.
All the time. And his worry-to-success equation is an inverse
proportion. He only gives up worrying and fussing when things get
truly awful.
    Garrett!
    “All right!” He’s so damned lazy he
can’t be bothered to die but he expects me to scurry like
bees getting ready for winter. And sees no inconsistency.
“All right. Here’s the official plan, Play.”
     
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4
    Playmate’s job was to come into the alley from its
Wizard’s Reach end. Being younger and more athletic I took
the longer way around so I could close in from the other direction.
I trotted west on Macunado, then ducked into a narrow, fetid
breezeway, where I kicked up a covey of pixies who were living
under an overturned basket. Poor, new immigrants, obviously. I knew
before I saw their ragged country costumes. “You folks better
find yourselves someplace where you won’t have to fight off
the cats and dogs and rats.” Though TunFaire’s dogs and
cats do, mostly, know better than to bother little people. But
rats, while cunning, aren’t always real bright. And as for
the others, hunger has a way of overwhelming even the most pointed
of past lessons.
    These little folk thanked me for my concern by swarming around
me, cursing in tiny voices while threatening to stick me with
teensy poisoned rapiers.
    When I entered the breezeway the Goddamned Parrot was a
passenger on my shoulder. He was behaving. But once I started
leaping and swatting at those damned mosquitoes he flapped toward a
perch high above, whence he spouted gratuitous advice. To the
pixies: “Stay to his left! He doesn’t see as well on
that side . . . Awk!”
    The racket had attracted the interest of one of those
leather-winged flying lizards that sometimes nap up on the rooftops
between pigeon snacks. They aren’t common anymore, mostly
because they have trouble outthinking large rocks. They make rats
and pigeons look like shining intellectuals. They are very slow
learners.
    This one looked particularly shopworn. The trailing edges of its
wings were tattered. It had patches of mold on its chest.
    When it looked at the Goddamn Parrot it saw the answer to all
its prayers.
    It was the scruffiest flying lizard I’d ever seen but it
still looked like the answer to a prayer or two of my own. Life
would be so much simpler if I got rid of the chicken in the clown
suit—as long as I could manage it in some way that
wouldn’t aggravate the Dead Man or Morley Dotes. Morley had
gifted me with the jabbering vulture, accompanied by a strong
suggestion that no harm should