Glen Cook - Angry Lead Skies

We all stepped back. We exchanged troubled looks. I said, "That's an illusion of the highest order."

Singe said, "I hear someone calling from the other side."

Playmate observed, "An illusion that persists, that can be used as camouflage, requires the efforts of a master wizard."

I grunted. In this town that meant somebody off the Hill. It meant one of six dozen or so people who are the real masters in Karenta.

Singe said, "There is somebody over there. Yelling at you, Garrett."

I asked Playmate, "What do you think?" I admit to being intimidated by Hill people. But I've never backed down just because they stuck a finger in somewhere. I wouldn't back down now. Kip's kidnapping had me irked and interested. Of everyone I asked, "Anybody want to walk away?"

Nobody volunteered to leave, though Saucerhead gulped a pail of air, Playmate seemed to go a little green and Singe started shaking like she was naked in a blizzard and didn't have a clue which way to the warm. She made some kind of chalk sign on a real wall, maybe to ward off evil.

"You're the Marine," Playmate said. "Show us your stuff."

Saucerhead pasted on a huge grin. He was ex-army, too. And he had heard my opinions concerning the relative merits of the services more often than had Playmate. He refused to see the light. It's a debate that seems doomed to persist forever because army types are too dim to recognize the truth when it kicks them in the teeth.

Saucerhead's whole face threatened to open up. I thought the top half of his head was going to tip over backward onto his shoulders. He gasped out, "Yeah, Garrett. Let's see some of that old Marine Corps ‘Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle.' "

Ominously, Singe said, "There is no yelling anymore."

"I'm thinking about giving you some of that good old, big boy." I took a deep breath and squared off with the illusory wall.

Saucerhead chuckled. He knows I'd never come straight at him if I did think I had to get after him. Business led us to butt heads briefly once upon a time, long ago. The results had been far from satisfactory from my point of view.

I whooped like I was going in, back in my island warfare days, straight up the middle indeed. Something that we did not actually do very often, as I recall. Us and the Venageti both very much preferred sneaking around, stabbing in the back, to any straightforward and personally risky charging.

That wall was more than just an illusion. It resisted me. Hitting it felt a little like belly flopping, though with more stretch and give to the surface. Which popped after a moment. And which felt as cold as a god's heart until it did.

My efforts evidently weakened the wall considerably because the big army types followed me through as though there wasn't any resistance at all. And the civilian followed them. But I wasn't really keeping track.

We'd overtaken our quarry where they'd holed up temporarily, either so they could interrogate Kip or so their injured buddies could recuperate. There was another imaginary wall beyond them. That one had a bricklike look even though it was semitransparent. From my point of view.

My heart jumped. Our approach had to have been noticed.

In that instant I sensed movement. The corner of the eye kind of movement you get when your imagination is running wild. Only what I wasn't imagining was happening right in front of me and I couldn't get a solid look at it. Then, for a moment, I saw silver elves and Kip with something clamped over his mouth and I realized that Singe's sharp ears must've caught his cries for help back when she'd kept talking and nobody had bothered to listen.

A shimmering silver elf extended a hand toward me.

I dodged.

I didn't move soon enough.

Once again I didn't feel the darkness arrive.

Morley Dotes was right there in my face again when I woke up. "Some kind of party you must throw, Garrett. Blitzed into extinction again. And the sun still hasn't gone down." He looked around as I tried to sit up. My head pounded worse than before. "But in an alley? Even if it is a pretty clean one for this burg?"

"Gods! My head! I don't know what they did to me but it's enough to make me consider giving up liquor."

"You give up your beer? Don't try to kid a kidder, kid."

"I said liquor, nimrod. Beer is a holy elixir. One shuns beer only at the risk of one's immortal soul. I see you're all freshly prettied up. How'd you find us?"

Two of Morley's henchmen had accompanied him. I didn't know them. They were clad in the outfits waiters at The Palms usually wear but they were much younger than Sarge and Puddle and Morley's other traditional associates. Maybe the old guys were getting too old.

"Your girlfriend left us a trail to follow. Standard rat chalk symbols. You didn't notice? A trained detective like you?"

Pride made me consider fibbing. "No. I didn't. Not really." Ten years ago I couldn't have admitted any failing. Which, at times, had left me looking just a whole lot stupider than a simple confession would've done.

People are strange. And sometimes I think I might be the strangest people I know.

Morley's boys didn't lift a finger to help anybody. Dotes himself didn't do anything but talk. Which told me he thought none of us had been hurt badly. "What happened to the illusion?"

"What illusion?"

I explained. Morley wanted to disbelieve but dared not in the face of Saucerhead's confirmation. Tharpe doesn't have the imagination to dress himself up with excuses as complex as this.

"So you scared them into running when they're not really up to it. They have two casualties and a prisoner to manage."

"We don't know that any of them were hurt."

"Yes, we do, Garrett. Use that brain the Dead Man thinks you have. If they don't have someone injured they don't have any reason not to just drag the kid straight off to wherever it is they want to take him. Let's get back on the trail. They can't have gone far."

Maybe he was right. Maybe the villains were just around the corner. But I didn't have any way to track them. Right now.

Singe was still out, stone cold.

"I wonder if they understand how we found them." I was afraid the elves might've given Singe an extra dose of darkness because of her nose.

"Me, I'm wondering why they didn't hurt you a lot more than they did," Morley countered. His cure for most ills is to exterminate everybody involved. "For some reason they've slapped you down twice without doing any permanent harm." He has difficulty comprehending that kind of thinking.

He emphasized "permanent" because my expression revealed the depth and breadth of the temporary harm I was suffering.

"You all right, Saucerhead?"

"Got a miserable headache." Tharpe's voice was gravelly. His temper would be extremely short. Best not to disturb him at all.

"How 'bout you, Play?"

"What he said. And don't yell. Makes it hurt even more."

He didn't need to yell back.

Maybe I was lucky. All the practice I've had dealing with hangovers. I turned to Singe. "Seems a shame to disturb her." She did look rather peaceful.

"Kiss her and let's get on with it," Morley grumped. Without having been blessed by the elves.

"What?"

He opened his mouth to crack wise about the sleeping beauty, thought better of it, beckoned me. I followed him for as far as he felt was far enough to keep his remarks from being overhead by sharp rat ears. "She isn't really out, Garrett. She's giving you a chance to show some special concern."

The fact that he didn't make mock let me know that he was serious, that he was concerned about bruising Singe's tender ego. Though the motives behind his concern were, probably, wholly selfish.

"Understood," I told him, though that wasn't entirely true.