I went.
A door closed behind us. It hung crookedly. The stairs had no business surviving our combined weight. Puddle picked up the light off the earthen cellar floor once we got down. It consisted of a cracked teacup half-filled with oil. The wick was a floating glob of lint. Puddle could carry the damned thing. It looked hot. And he knew where we were headed.
"Morley really this concerned?"
"Bad tings goin' on out dere, Garrett. It don't hurt none ta be careful."
Everybody in town was more paranoid than me. Maybe I should get a little crazy myself. "It'll all work out. History's drama has got a way of doing that." But it sure can get rough on the cast and crew.
"Ya ever go ta da plays? Dey's a great new one at da Strand, I been ta see it t'ree times already. Called Atterbohns da Toid on account of it's about King Atterbohns, one a da ones from way back."
I was surprised. The Strand doesn't put on the kind of show I'd associate with a mind like Puddle's. Hardly anybody would take their clothes off.
The more excited he grew the denser his speech became. "Dat's da Atterbohns what murdered his brodder and married his sister an' had a baby by her dat grew up ta help his gran'ma raise dis army aginst his fodder... " He whooped off and gave me every detail, half of which were historically inaccurate. Not having seen the drama myself I couldn't tell if the fault was his or the playwright's. The historical Atterbohns married his brother's widow, his sister-in-law, a perfectly respectable thing for the time, though murder was a bit of a gaffe. Less respectable was the fact that the sister-in-law orchestrated everything, including numerous other murders and the revolt of the son—who perished, along with his grandmother, in questionable circumstances later, to be followed to the throne by a six-year-old brother whose paternity was somewhat dubious.
A play about Atterbohns III would have to be one of the new tragedies. Its moral would be too dark and heavy for a passion play or traditional comedy. "I might go see it just to see how much license the playwright took with history. Who wrote it?"
"I dunno. We get ta da end a dis tunnel, ya gotta be quiet. It runs inta anudder one dat ain't ours. We don't wanna attrack no attention."
TunFaire has a million secrets. They probably extend two miles down into the earth and two up into the air. Were there enough overlapping tunnels for me to sneak all the way downtown to the brewery caverns? That sent me into a tumult of speculation. If all the tunnels and caverns under TunFaire were connected, control of them would be a major asset.
There were rumors and legends about people and things supposedly living underground. One beaut involved a king of the ratpeople who was a sort of cross between a high priest and Chodo Contague, a ratman wish-fantasy, something a Reliance would be if he had a whole lot of brains and guts and luck.
Surprisingly, none of the legends featured dwarves.
Puddle made a right turn when the tunnel ended. I stayed quiet, as instructed. Eventually we found a stairway from the same litter as the one leading down from the seamtress's shop. A door stood ajar at the top. A gray light outlined it. I let Puddle get all the way up before I risked the steps myself. Having survived him I knew they would support me.
I stepped into the entry foyer of a tenement that decades ago had entertained middle-class pretensions. Not a soul was around. The place even lacked the usual squallings of infants, yellings of husbands and fathers, shriekings of wives and mothers, whimpers of despair that characterize such places. But you could almost feel the tenants holding their breaths behind their curtained doorways. The cellar door standing ajar must be an omen of dreadful portent.
Puddle was puffing so hard I thought he'd collapse. He wasted no energy. He used his gasps to extinguish the light, which he left on the step behind the cellar door. He closed that.
We hit the street. Five blocks later we joined Morley in a dwarfish hole-in-the-wall. None of the hairy folk seemed to mind his elven blood.
"What was that all about?" I asked. "Other than the obvious."
"The people following you have a supernatural knack for keeping track. It wanted to test its limits."
"That's all?"
"There's more. In back." He nodded. I preceded him past a dwarfish staff who saw nothing. We were ghosts.
The quest for profit makes for strange bedfellows.
88
Spooky people were waiting in a back room. Belinda Contague and Pular Singe sat beside a crippled table with rags piled on top. "What's this?"
Morley let me have it behind the ear with a sap.
I said, "Wha de grungle frunz ya?... " It made perfect sense to me but apparently not to anyone else. At least nobody tried to answer me.
The darkness never really came. Not entirely. I remained vaguely aware of being manhandled and womanhandled and rathandled and half-elf handled around till I was the vain wearer of a tonsorial array fit to embarrass most guys who haunt alleys for a living. Puddle stuffed everything in a bag—including my proud tools of mayhem—and vanished. Morley and Belinda tied me to the rickety chair formerly occupied by Pular Singe. Singe said something apologetic and drifted off after Puddle.
The scow of consciousness pitched and rolled across heavy seas. The thump had reawakened every headache I'd enjoyed lately. I talked some more but only a drunk would have understood. Or maybe Singe. I'd understood her.
Morley said something about if I was the real thing, he'd treat me to the gourmet best of The Palms. I could not express my joy.
Belinda's apologies sounded more promising.
The two of them rubbed me all over with silver.
A dwarfish voice gobbled something. Morley responded in the same tongue. Belinda began letting me loose. I tried to turn her over my knee but had barely strength enough to raise a hand. I said something in a tongue that sounded sufficiently dwarfish to me but drew no response from anyone else.
I understood Belinda when she said, "You hit him too hard."
"I hit him just right. Too hard and he wouldn't be breathing."
"I think you scrambled his brains."
"Be a little hard to mix them up more than they already are. He'll come out of it."
Bless him for his optimism. I would take it into account when I got even for all his abuses.
"Sorry," he told me, not sounding the least bit contrite. "We had to make sure Puddle got the real you. Been several Garrett sightings lately and I'm sure that, talented as you are, you're not yet able to be two places at once."
"I'm gonna work on it, though," I promised. "I'm gonna be having dinner with Relway and Colonel Block while I'm stuffing that talking vulture down your throat. Sideways."
Some of that dribbled out in comprehensible Karentine. Morley seemed surprised by my attitude. But he didn't let it get in his way. "Something that looked like you turned up at The Palms last night asking for Belinda."
I glanced at Belinda. She was still hanging out there? "Not what you think, Garrett," she said. "Crask and Sadler did such a good job I can still barely move."
Morley continued, "We knew it wasn't you right away."
"Uhn?" So a shapeshifter went there pretending to be me. If there was an easy way to recognize one, I wanted to know. Later. After my head stopped hurting.
"Sarge offered you a mixed pepper platter. One of his little jokes. But you took it and dug right in."
"Now I know they're completely stupid." Even a hog has more sense than to eat peppers. Morley's pepper platter is a gorgeous mix of colors and shapes. Kind of like parrot on a plate. Just the stench, though, would've had me gagging—if I'd been into self-abuse far enough to let Sarge shove something that nasty under my nose in the first place. "What did you do with it?" In a few hours one of those critters could destroy a reputation I've worked on for years.