Glen Cook - Deadly Quicksilver Lies

Bingo. I knew her now, nose to nose and her eyes on fire. Take away a few decades of pain and poverty and you'd have another Maggie Jenn.

Maggie hadn't said anything about her mother's fate.

The topmost floor of the Bledsoe was reserved for those who had no truck with poverty except by way of charity. It sustained an environment those folks would deem minimally adequate while they decided the fates of TunFaire's Waldo Tharpes.

We didn't need the burning man up there. Good Old Fred let him go. He collapsed, burnt meat and charred bone. Direheart ignored the old woman. We didn't need her. I tried to shoo her away. She wouldn't go.

Chaz wasn't frayed but didn't seem to be in close touch with reality anymore, either. During my own occasional brushes with sanity I'd begun wondering if she really was the girl for me. Her good points were obvious, but something was missing. When Good Old Fred was around she could turn into a zombie.

That green-and-yellow-and-red feather duster on her shoulder didn't betray any character, either.

Weird.

It got weirder.

First, Ichabod rernaterialized. Pardon me. Make that Zeke. Maybe he came back from the grave. I'd thought he'd got plenty dead on the Hill. But here he was, all skin, bones, and white hair, trying to heft a big black sword that was beyond his strength. Good Old Fred did some evil things. That sword turned on Zeke. The old boy didn't even get out a good scream.

Mugwump emerged from the shadows. That human stump was not in a good mood. (He had to be immune to disaster.) I was glad Fred was in between us.

Direheart wasn't ready for a Mugwump. Mugwump like to broke him into kindling before he conjured a bucket of eldritch fire. Mugwump ended up blind and burning. Direheart came away dragging a foot. He couldn't use his left arm.

Chaz showed no distress. She drifted along, gorgeous and empty and handy. Her dullness worried me more and more.

The Goddamn Parrot's silence didn't help.

Then we found a sleep-fuddled Grange Cleaver trying to pull himself together. Twenty feet separated us from him. Fred went out of control. He snarled, cursed, pulled a knife, and charged. Cleaver got loose from his cot and discarded his surprise. He pulled two knives. Lucky he wasn't one of those gods with a bunch of arms. He threw both blades. One knicked Direheart's right shoulder.

The blow wasn't crippling, but it did put the firelord's good arm out of commission. Sorcerers don't do well when they can't talk with their hands.

I closed in on Cleaver. Cleaver had another blade. He assumed a knifefighter's crouch, edged sideways. His eyes were hard, narrow, and serious. He didn't seem frightened.

Chaz said something. I told her, "Take care of your father. After you lock the door." The Bledsoe was crawling with guys who begrudged me my fine escape.

Direheart shook Chaz off. Calmly, he explained to the Rainmaker how he was going to feed his scum-sucking corpse to the rats. Direheart had him an awful big anger about that old burglary.

Cleaver kept his knife weaving between him and me. He edged toward an outside wall. His caution seemed to be taking him back into a corner.

I got it way too late.

Direheart tried to let me become Cleaver's focus while he got ready to sneak in some deadly spell...

Cleaver lunged at me. I stumbled back. Quick as a conjurer, the Rainmaker spun and flipped his blade. It sank into Direheart's throat.

I froze. Chaz screamed. Cleaver cackled, whirled, jumped out a window. Chaz grabbed me with one hand and her father with the other, pulled like I could do something.

A born gentleman, I grabbed blond hair and pried her loose. "You're a physician. Do what you trained for."

I threw one angry glance at the old woman, let her get on with her shuffling getaway. Oh, she was ready to go now. I went after Cleaver.

I'm not fond of heights—especially if Mrs. Garrett's boy might conceivably fall therefrom. I paused to eyeball the scaffolding below me.

Sneering laughter electrified me. I dropped the eight feet to the highest level the workmen had reached. I made a lucky grab and didn't plunge sixty feet to the cobblestones, where shadows darted. I was too far up to recognize anybody—not to mention I didn't consider trying.

The Goddamn Parrot swooped past, dove through the scaffolding. He zig-zagged like a bat, let out one serious squawk as he ripped past Cleaver. The Rainmaker cursed. Softly.

I concentrated on not achieving the unexpected experience of flight. All my hands grabbed anything convenient. All my feet assiduously maintained contact with whatever lay beneath them. I stormed slowly toward the Goddamn Parrot's noxious racket.

Cleaver cursed again. He'd looked down into a dark future. Big trouble was waiting.

I checked the street, too. Its shadows harbored folks who wanted to talk to the Rainmaker up close and personal. They must have picked up a clue or two via denizens of the Joy House.

Instead of heading down, Cleaver fled around the Bledsoe. Through one open window I spied Outfit hardcases on the prowl. Belinda must have had a crew on standby.

I don't quite get Morley's relationship with those people. He's no made man himself. He does them more favors than seems right.

The Goddamn Parrot kept beaking news of Cleaver's progress. I really wondered about that bird. This was out of character. His natural style would be to betray me, instead.

The thugs below couldn't see us. They tried to track the bird, too.

That hunk of spoiled hawk bait blew the big one. Cleaver set an ambush. He let me slink right into it.

I was twice Cleaver's weight and twice Cleaver's strength and that saved me a three-story decline in fortunes. He threw himself at me. I grabbed some scaffold and absorbed the impact. I tried to glom onto him while I was at it but didn't do real well.

He ricocheted off me, banged into an upright, bounced back toward the stone face of the Bledsoe, let loose one whimper of outrage, dropped into the gap between scaffolding and building. He scratched and grabbed and banged around as he fell but didn't verbalize at all.

I followed more cautiously. The Goddamn Parrot flapped around me but managed to keep his big damned beak shut. I caught up.

Cleaver had broken his fall and dragged himself onto planking maybe ten feet off the ground. His breathing was shallow and rapid. He wasn't in good shape. But he bit down on his pain.

The vinegar was out of him, but I moved carefully anyway. A guy has the Rainmaker's rep, you're careful with him even after he's dead.

I dropped to one knee. A hand seized mine. I jerked away for an instant, startled. That hand was warm and soft.

"We could have had... something. But you're... too damned dumb... Garrett. And stubborn."

I don't know about stubborn, but I was doing dumb pretty good. I didn't get it right away.

Cleaver was fading. Didn't seem right, considering his record. A long, agonizing cancer was more in order, not this just kind of drifting off into oblivion.

My hands were trapped. I didn't try hard to pull away. I had empathy enough to guess what was happening in Cleaver's mind. Though broken, he pulled himself toward me, closer, closer...

Realization came slowly, sort of sideways, without generating much shock. This creature desperately grasping at one final moment of human contact wasn't male at all.

I held her. I murmured, "Yes, love," when she returned to her notion that we might have had something remarkable.

I'd been wrong from the beginning. But so had all TunFaire. Past and present, high and low, we'd all seen only what society had conditioned us to see. And in her madness, she had exploited that blindness.

There never was any nasty little villain named Grange Cleaver. Not ever. Never.