"Shush. I need to concentrate."
So now it was me who was the distraction. The triplets weren't because they were keeping their distance, pretending they weren't with me. Good on whichever one of them thought of that. But I needed to toss my swag bag into the cart with Dojango. I wasn't about to carry it forever.
My aches and pains had receded somewhat but they continued to hamper me. I limped and gimped and had no sense of humor at all. I couldn't even work myself into a state of amusement over Singe's recent discombobulation. And that was pretty damned funny. It could become a classic after a few retellings polished it up.
When our path took us around a corner, thus taking us out of sight of any eyes tagging along behind, I halted. I didn't move until Doris and Marsha appeared.
I tossed my swag bag into Dojango's lap. The results were satisfactory. Rose's enthusiastic barking demonstrated that he had been faking unconsciousness.
I left him to his brothers. Singe and I traveled on into the night, me limping and groaning and demonstrating grand vigor in protesting my determination to find a new way to make a living.
"Where in hell are we going?" I muttered. We'd been walking for hours. It was the middle of the night. I felt every step in every muscle and every joint. We were way up north, passing through neighborhoods where real elves roamed. Singe and I drew stares from folks curious about whether we were a couple. I could've told them that we were a couple of idiots.
This was dangerous country. But if we stuck to the main thoroughfare, the Grand Avenue, we should be all right, partly because it was customarily safe ground, partly because Doris and Marsha were ambling along with us, their clubs dragging the cobblestones and their knuckles threatening to get down there soon.
"I am following the trail, Garrett. I am not creating it." Singe was getting cranky, too. Probably needed to get some food in her.
"This is why I hate working. Once you get started you can't just knock off when you feel like it and have a couple of beers. You've got to keep going until you drop. Why don't you eat one of your sandwiches?"
Singe immediately went to the back of the cart and dug out several. "If it makes you feel better knowing, we are much closer than we were. Their scent is almost fresh. They are less than three hours ahead."
Every silver lining has a cloud.
"That's the godsdamned gate up there!" I grumbled, glaring at an island of light in the far distance. "Please don't tell me they left town."
"All right." Singe sounded troubled. And she should. For ratpeople TunFaire's outer wall constitutes the edge of the world. Go past it and you fall off into the misty void.
The situation wasn't much better for me. I don't like not-city. I don't go outside often. When I do I prefer to visit some rich man's estate, where I can be comfortable while I take care of business. I get back to town as fast as I can.
If we kept going this general direction for a few hours we could drop in on the Contague estate.
Although I know better intellectually, emotionally I feel like the deadly wilderness is clamoring at the city gate, all carnivorous or poisonous plants and animals, most of them bigger and faster than me, while the air is so full of man-eating bugs that you don't dare breathe deep. In reality, most of the countryside near TunFaire is well tamed. If it wasn't it wouldn't be able to feed the city. The exceptions are some bits unsuited for exploitation or which the wealthy and powerful have set aside as hunting reserves or whatnot. The rare incursions of thunder lizards, mammoths, or even bears or giant ground sloths, are just that: rare. But they sure do get talked about plenty.
Marsha said, "We maybe need to take a sleep break first if we're really going to go out there, Garrett."
He had a point. A good point. Or, at least, a damned good excuse for us not to go wandering around the wilderness in the dark. Even if we were only a few hours behind our friends.
44
Wilderness is relative. Before sunrise we were in wild country compared to where I live. But we were in a carefully tamed and only mildly unkempt park compared to the places where I fought my share of the war.
Of course, this was the worst nightmare wilderness Singe had ever seen. She couldn't take ten steps without stopping to sniff the morning air for the warning stench of approaching monsters. I kept after her to move faster. "The quicker we get there the quicker we get it over with and the quicker we get back to town. You don't want to spend the night out here, do you?" But instinct is hard to overcome. I prove that every time I get too close to Belinda Contague. "Besides, the grolls can handle anything we're likely to meet."
Dojango had been yakking all morning, inconsequentialities. Typical of him, actually. So much so that nobody paid him the least attention. Though Doris did drag him out of the cart and have him pull it as one way of slowing his jaw down.
"Wait a minute," I said. "What was that?"
Because Dojango's mouth runs with no real connection to his brain he just chomped air for a minute. What might he have said that could interest me? He hadn't been listening. Then he went into mild shock because somebody was interested in something that he'd said. "Uh, I don't remember, actually."
"About the thing you saw in the sky."
"Oh. That happened while you were all asleep, actually."
When the time had come we'd all just planted ourselves at streetside, grolls on the flanks, and started snoring. We hadn I been bothered.
Size does matter.
Dojango continued, "I decided I'd stand watch on account of all of the rest of you were out like the dead."
He was fibbing. He hadn't been able to sleep because he'd spent all that time snoozing in the cart. It's easy to tell when Dojango is revising history. He forgets to use his favorite word.
"And?"
"And a ball of light came in out of the east, from beyond the river. It went somewhere south of us. It stopped for a while. I could see the glow. Then it came north, slowly, drifting back and forth over Grand Avenue. I had a feeling it was looking for something, actually."
"And it came to a stop up above us?"
"Yeah. After a while it shined a really bright light down on us. And that's all I remember." He shuddered, though. So there was something more.
"What else?"
He didn't want to talk about it but Dojango Rose is incapable of resisting an invitation to speak. "Just a really bad dream where the light lifted me up and took me inside the glow, into a weird, lead-gray place. They did really awful things to me, these weird, shiny little women. This one wouldn't leave my thing alone."
"I see." He'd healed wondrous fast if he'd been tortured. "Something to keep in mind." I did some thinking. Some consideration of the circumstances. I came up with some ideas.
The first time we approached a sizable woodlot which boasted enough tangled undergrowth to suggest that it wasn't used much I had Doris and Marsha carry the cart and its cargo deep inside and camouflage it with branches.
Dojango cried like a baby.
"I guarantee you I don't have a whole lot of sympathy, buddy. Why don't you use your sore feet to make the rest of you mad enough to smack some of those elves around when we catch up with them?"
That bought me a respite. Dojango Rose is a lover, not a fighter. He probably heard his mother calling but couldn't run away as long as his brothers stuck it out.
We passed gated estates. The grolls attracted considerable attention. Most of the guards were friendlier than they might have been had I tried to engage them in conversation on my own. Doris and Marsha make a convincing argument just standing around, leaning on their clubs.