Glen Cook: Dread Brass Shadows

I did have a few little bottles left over from the time I'd done undercover work for the Grand Inquisitor. I took the case down, looked inside. Three bottles, one emerald, one royal blue, one ruby, each about two ounces. You threw them. Once they broke, the stuff inside took the fight right out of guys. The contents of the red one would melt the flesh off their bones I was saving that for somebody who really got on my nerves. If I ever used it, I'd have to stand back a ways.

I put the case away, secreted knives all over me, hung the longest tool legal on my belt, then took down my most useful all-round instrument, an oaken headthumper eighteen inches long. It had a pound of lead inside the business end. It did wonders making me more convincing when I got into an argument

So what was I going to do now? Go looking for some villains, just on general principles? Sure. Right. The way my luck runs, I'd have a building fall on me before I found any bad boys to astonish and dismay.

I managed to kill time till supper came along. I spent most of it trying to figure out why I was restless and uneasy. Tinnie had been hurt, but she was going to make it. Saucerhead and I had—sort of—dissuaded her attacker from becoming a repeat offender. Everything had turned out all right. Things were going to be fine.

Sure.

I didn't get much sleep that night.

It was a time of weirdness for TunFaire, maybe because of the weather. The whole world had turned cockeyed, not just me with my running and my going to bed early so I could get up before anybody sane was oriented vertically. Mammoths had been seen from the city wall. Saber-tooth tigers were at large within a day's travel. There were rumors of werewolves. There were rumors of thunder-lizards being sighted near KirtchHeis, just sixty miles north of TunFaire, two hundred south of their normal range. To our south, centaurs and unicorns, fleeing ferocious fighting in the Cantard, had penetrated Karentine territory. Every night, here in the city, the sky filled with squabbling morCartha, weird creatures who traditionally confined their brawls to rain-forested valleys on the marches of thunder-lizard country.

Where the morCartha disappeared during the day no one knew—nobody gave a big enough care to find out— but all night they zoomed over the rooftops settling old tribal scores or swooped down to mug citizens or to steal anything not nailed down. Most people accepted their presence as proof the thunder-lizards were migrating. In their own country morCartha lived in the treetops and slept during the day. That would make them easy snacks for the taller thunder-lizards. Some of these stand more than thirty feet tall.

Despite the morning's excitement I tried going to bed at what Dean and the Dead Man perversely call a reasonable hour. My theory was that if I rolled out early, my neighbors wouldn't be out to giggle and point at the spectacle of Garrett running laps. But that night the morCartha brought their flying carnival to my neighborhood. It sounded like the aerial battle of the century. Blood and broken bodies and war cries and taunts rained down. Whenever I threatened to drift off, they staged some absurd, cacophonous confrontation right outside my window.

I decided it was time somebody on the Hill suffered a stroke of smarts and enlisted them all as mercenaries and sent them down to the Cantard to look for Glory Mooncalled. Let him lose sleep while they squabbled over his head.

Old Glory probably wasn't getting much sleep, anyway. The Karentine powers that be had thrown everything into the cauldron down there. They were grinding his upstart republic fine, inexorably and inevitably, permitting him no chance to catch his breath and turn his genius toward their despair.

The war between Karenta and Venageta has been going on since my grandfather's time. It's become as much a part of life as the weather. Glory Mooncalled started out a mercenary captain in Venageti service, had a major falling out with the Venageti warlords, and came over to our side swearing mighty oaths of vengeance. Once he had smashed everybody who offended him, he suddenly declared the Cantard—possession of which is what the war is all about—an autonomous republic. All the Cantard's native nonhuman races supported him. So, for the moment, Karenta and Venageta have a common cause, the obliteration of Glory Mooncalled. Once he's gone, it'll be back to war as usual.

All of which is of more interest to the Dead Man than me. I did my five years in the Marines and survived. I don't want to remember. The Dead Man does. Glory Mooncalled is his hobby.

Whatever, I didn't sleep well and I was less cheerful than usual when I got up, which is saying something. On my best mornings I'm human only by charity. Morning is the lousiest time of day. The lower the sun in the east, the lousier that time is.

The racket in the street started about the time I got my feet on the floor.

A woman screamed. She was frightened. Nothing galvanizes me so quickly. I was down at the door with a small arsenal before I started thinking. Somebody was pounding on that door now, yelling my name and begging to be let in. I peeped through the peephole. One ounce of brain was working. I saw a woman's face. Terrified. I fumbled at bolts, yanked the door open.

A naked woman stumbled inside. I gawked for half a minute before my brain started chugging. Then I checked the street. I saw nothing till a thing slightly larger than a spider monkey, built along similar lines but hairless and red, with batlike wings instead of arms and with a spadelike point at the end of its tail, crashed and flopped around, squealing. A city ratman ambled over. The moment it stopped moving, he shoveled it into his wheeled trash bin. The creature's kin didn't protest or claim the body. The morCartha are indifferent to their dead.

So now they were doing it in the daytime, too. If you could call it daytime. Just because it was light out. Personally, I don't believe daytime really starts till the sun is straight overhead.

I slammed the door, spun around. The woman had collapsed. What I saw in that bad light was enough to make my hair stand up and get split ends.

Not a stitch on her, like I said, but she had the body to wear that kind of outfit. She clutched a raggedly wrapped package in her left hand. I couldn't pry it loose.

The word flabbergasted gets bandied about in this age of exaggeration, but you don't often get into a situation where it's appropriate. This was a time when it was appropriate. I didn't know what to do.

Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against naked women. Especially nothing against naked women when they're beautiful and running around my house. Most especially not when I'm chasing them and they have no intention of getting away. But I'd never had one come to the door all ready to race. I'd never had one drop in and instantly transport herself to dreamland with such diligence that I couldn't wake her again.

I was still trying to figure out what to do when Dean showed up for work.

Dean is my housekeeper and cook, in case you haven't figured that out. He's a sour-faced but sentimental guy about a thousand years old who should have been born a woman because he'd make somebody a great wife. He can cook and keep house and has a tongue to match the nastiest of them. He took one look at the woman. "I just cleaned that carpet, Mr. Garrett. Couldn't you confine your games to the second floor?"

"I just let her in, Dean. She came this way, right off the street. I opened the door, she stumbled in and passed out. Maybe she was hit by the morCartha. She's gone into a fugue I can't wake her up."

"Must you stare so shamelessly?"

"I don't notice you studying the fly specks on the ceiling." He wasn't that old. Nobody ever gets that old. And the lady deserved a stare or two. She was the nicest package I'd had stumble in in a long time. "Hell, yes, I must. How often do the gods bother to send us the answer to our prayers?"