Dean is good for that. Sometimes I claim it's the only reason I keep him on. Sometimes I believe what I say.
We hadn't had a strange face in for a while, which spurred Dean to one of his better efforts. That and the fact that Pokey can lay it on with a shovel when he wants and Dean is addicted to everybody's flattery but mine.
Pokey leaned back and patted his stomach, drenched Dean with a bucket of bullhooly, belched, and looked at me. "So let's have it, Garrett."
I lifted an eyebrow. It's one of my best tricks. I'm working on my ear-wiggling. I know the ladies will love that.
"You took on a client you want to farm out," Pokey went on without waiting. "Good-looking woman with style, I'd guess, or she wouldn't have gotten past Dean. And if she had, you wouldn't have listened to her."
Had he been listening at the keyhole? "Regular deductive genius isn't he, Dean?"
"If you say so, sir."
"I don't. He was probably hanging around trying to beg crumbs from our castoffs." I told Pokey the story. All I left out was the size of the retainer. He didn't need to know that.
"Sounds like she's running a game," Pokey agreed. "You said Jill Craight?"
"That's the name she gave. You know it?"
"Seems like I should. Can't put a finger on why." He used his pinkie to scratch the inside of his ear. "Couldn't have been important."
Dean produced a peach cobbler, something he'd never do without company present. It was hot. He buried it in whipped cream. Then he served tea. Pokey went to work like he wanted to store up fat for the next ice age.
Afterwards we leaned back, and Pokey lighted one of those savage little black stink sticks he favors, then went to catching me up on the news. I hadn't been out of the house for days. Dean hadn't kept me posted. He hoped silence would drive me out. He never says so but he worries when I'm not working.
"The big news is Glory Mooncalled did it again."
"What now?" Glory Mooncalled and the war in the Cantard are special interests around my house. When he's awake the Dead Man makes a hobby of trying to predict the unpredictable, the mercenary Mooncalled.
"He ambushed Fire lord Sedge at Rapistan Sands. Ever heard of it?"
"No." That was no surprise. Glory Mooncalled was operating farther into the Venageti Cantard than any Karentine before him. "He took Sedge out?" It was a safe guess; his ambushes had yet to fail.
"Thoroughly. How many left on his list?"
"Not many. Maybe three." Mooncalled had begun his war on the Venageti side. The Venageti War Council had managed to tick him off so bad he'd come over to Karenta vowing to collect their heads. He'd been picking them off ever since.
He's become a folk hero for us ordinary slobs and a big pain in the patoot for the ruling class, though he's winning their war. His easy victories have shown them to be the incompetents we've always known they are.
Pokey said, "What happens when he's done and all of a sudden we don't have a war for the first time since before any of us were born?"
The Dead Man had an answer. I didn't think it would go over with Pokey. I changed the subject. "What's the latest on the temple scandals?" Playmate had tried to give me the scoop but his heart hadn't been in it. The scandals weren't the circus for him they were for me. His religious side was embarrassed by the antics of our self-anointed spiritual shepherds.
"Nothing new. Plenty of finger-pointing. Lot of 'I was framed.' On the retail level it's still at the swinging-drunks-in the-tavern stage."
For now. It would turn grim if Prester Legate Warden Agire and his Terrell Relics didn't turn up.
Agire was one of the top ten priests of the squabbling family of sects we lump together as Orthodox. His title Prester indicated his standing in the hierarchy, at about the level of a duke. Legate was an imperial appointment, supposedly plenipotentiary, in reality powerless. The imperial court persists and postures at Costain but has had no power for two hundred years. It survives as a useful political fiction. Warden is the title that matters. It means he's the one man in the world entrusted with guardianship of the Terrell Relics.
Agire and the Relics had disappeared.
I don't know what the Relics are. Maybe nobody but the Warden does anymore. He's the only one who ever sees them. Whatever, they're holy and precious not only to the Orthodox factions but to the Church, the Eremitics, the Scottites, the Canonics, the Cynics, the Ascetics, the Renunciates, and several Hanite creeds for whom Terrell is only a minor prophet or even an emissary of the archenemy. The bottom line is that they're important to almost all the thousand and one cults with followings in TunFaire.
Agire and the Relics had vanished. Everyone assumed the worst. But something was wrong. Nobody claimed responsibility. Nobody crowed over having gotten hold of the Relics. That baffled everybody. Possession of the Relics is a clear claim for the favor of the gods.
In the meantime, the whispering war of revelation had intensified. Priests of various rites had begun whittling away at rivals by betraying their venalities, corruptions, and sins. It had begun as border-incident stuff, little priests excoriating one another for drunkenness, for selling indulgences, for letting their hands roam during the confessional.
The fun had spread like fire in a tenement block. Now a day was incomplete without its disclosure about this or that bishop or prester or whatnot having fathered a child on his sister, having poisoned his predecessor, or having embezzled a fortune to buy his male mistress a forty-eight-room cabin in the country.
Most of the stories were true. There was so much real dirt, fabrication wasn't necessary—which satisfied my cynical side right down to its bunions. Reputations were getting reaped in windrows, and it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.
Pokey was bored by the whole business. If he had a weakness it was his narrowness. His work was his life. He could talk technique or case histories forever. Otherwise, only food held his attention.
I wondered what he did with his money. He lived in a scruffy one-room walk-up although he worked all the time, sometimes on several projects at once. When clients didn't find him, he went looking. He even went after things—deadly things—just to satisfy his own curiosity.
Whatever, he didn't feel like yakking up old news. His belly was full. I'd tantalized him with a wicked aroma. He wanted to get hunting.
I helped him puff Dean's ego, then walked him to the door. I sat down on the stoop to watch him out of sight.
4
The descending sun played arsonist among high, distant clouds. There was a light breeze. The temperature was perfect. It was a time to just lean back and feel content. Not many of those times fell my way.
I yelled for beer, then settled in to watch Nature redecorate the ceiling of the world. I didn't pay attention to the street. The little man was there on the stoop, making himself at home, passing me the big copper bucket of beer he'd brought, before I noticed him.
Up to no good? What else? But the beer was Weider's best lager. I don't get it that often.
He was a teeny dink, all wrinkled and gray, with a cant to his eyes and a yellow of tooth that suggested a big dollop of nonhuman blood. I didn't know him. That was all right. There are a lot of people I don't know, but I wondered if he was one of the ones I wanted to keep on not knowing.
"Thanks. Good beer."
"Mr. Weider said you'd appreciate it."
I'd done a job for Weider, rooting out an in-house theft ring without getting his guilty children too dirty. To discourage a relapse the old man kept me on retainer. I wander around the brewery when I have nothing better to do. I make people nervous there. Considering what he'd been losing, I'm cheap insurance. The retainer isn't much.