Angry Lead Skies

The racket got the Goddamn Parrot going. "Help! Help! Oh, Mister, please don't... " I leaned in to tell him, "Aw, shut yer ugly beak, ya little pervert," before I went on to the door. "Ain't nobody here who ain't heard it all before."

Wait.

"Huh?"

I believe we are about to have a caller.

"But somebody's trying to wreck the outside of the house."

Masons are removing a couple of bricks to permit the pixies access to the hollows in the middle course of the wall.

The outer walls of my place are three-course brick masonry, a very dark, blackish rough red brick. Typically, the center course of that sort of construction includes a lot of voids.

So some genius had gotten the notion that those voids could be turned into pixie apartments. Gah! Now I'd have them squabbling inside my walls, day and night.

I supposed chances were excellent the guilty genius spent most of his life making and unmaking messes in my kitchen.

As the Dead Man had predicted, someone knocked on the front door. The knock had that peremptory character I associated with the secret police, that combination of confidence and impatience.

Nor was my guess in error, though my visitor was no one I recognized. And had been chosen, no doubt, because of that fact. If they had to deal with me directly, they would show me too many faces to remember. "Yes?"

"Courier. I have a message for you from Colonel Block." A written message at that. He slapped a small, scroll-style document into my hand, then turned and took off, stepping like he was marching to a drumbeat pitched too high for human ears. He headed straight up the street to Mrs. Cardonlos' rooming house, probably to collect the daily reports. Which meant they'd given up bothering to pretend.

Well?

Reading, I closed the door with shoulder and elbow. "A report on what they've been doing about Reliance and some other rat gangsters using human slaves to manage their bookkeeping."

Generous of the colonel.

"Yes, indeed. And I'll tell you this. I wouldn't want to be a known ratman criminal right now." What Block was willing to commit to paper would be just the tip of the iceberg. And what he'd been willing to set down was so vicious and wicked that I felt belated reservations about having unleashed the whirlwind.

"Here's an interesting ‘Did you know?' Did you know that ratpeople, alone of all the intelligent peoples of TunFaire, have no legal standing whatsoever? Less, even, than an ox or a draft horse? That anyone can do just about any damned thing they want to them with complete legal impunity? Just the same as if they were regular rats?"

Easy to understand why, then, they would be bitter.

"Better believe." Not one in a hundred of my fellow royal subjects had a conscience sufficiently well developed to understand why I found that situation troubling, too.

Do not bruit that about. Few people know. Were that common knowledge, someone would soon be killing them for their fur or their teeth or their toenails, or something such.

And people capable of that were out there, strangers to conscience, remorse, and pity, who were constitutionally incapable of encompassing those concepts however often they were explained.

"I've unchained a beast."

This once may be for the best. Mr. Relway may know no limits but those he imposes from within. Which may make him appear infinitely ferocious even while those internal limits do exist. He will exterminate ratmen with wild enthusiasm but everyone who perishes will have been a true villain.

"Or if they weren't they wouldn't have gotten themselves dead. Right? I know that game of old."

Mr. Relway will dwindle away to that point someday, no doubt. But it won't be today. Today he still recalls that he's just a man. An overly idealistic sort of man.

"Shall I tell Singe?"

She will learn of it anyway.

"Tell Singe what?" Singe demanded, having entered the Dead Man's room soundly equipped to avoid starvation for at least a generation.

"That the Guard have attacked Reliance and several other leading ratmen. With the sort of acutely accurate intelligence you'd expect of Deal Relway. The Guard did it because Reliance has been keeping human slaves." Though the slaves' huma

Today we have indenture and apprenticeship and several forms of involuntary servitude involving debtors and convicted criminals but nobody owns another intelligent being outright. In law. Sometimes reality can be pretty ugly.

Acute and accurate intelligence? Then how come they hadn't known about the slavery? Or had they?

My cynical side quickly had me wondering if the raids weren't just image-building stunts launched at this point only because somebody with a big mouth and an overly moralistic attitude now knew what the ratmen were doing.

I told Singe, "The attacks have been remarkably vicious and violent." Because the Guard wanted to make an unmistakable point. A major new power player had entered the lists.

There would be truly big trouble if Relway ever got so overconfident that he went after the Outfit. Because there are a whole lot more of their bad guys than there are of his good guys. And those bad guys have far greater resources.

"And this would be the insurance you were taking on my behalf?"

There was no ducking the truth. "No Reliance, no threat from Reliance."

Singe did not get upset with me. What distress she did betray she directed at herself. She might not have willed disaster to devour Reliance but a disaster had occurred on her account. "You are right, Garrett. You are completely right. Life is a bitch."

"And then you die."

"Will Humility be all right?"

"I don't know. I tried to warn him. I hope he listened. I think he's someone I could get along with. And what I do, it's all co

"What we do, Garrett."

I started to speak.

Might I suggest a level of caution usually reserved for speech in the presence of Miss Tate?

He might. But that didn't mean I had a whole lot of use for it.

Singe continued, "I am part of this team, now. And I am not really asking for a salary, or anything."

"Nobody draws a salary here. But the more people there are around here, the more work has to be done to keep everybody in clothing and food. And the way you keep putting it away... You aren't pregnant, are you?" All I needed was a horde of rat pups underfoot, atop the rest of the zoo.

Not a smart suggestion, Garrett. Not a smart suggestion.

He was right. I'd managed to offend Singe at last. And her main complaint was a sound one: I'd tossed off a remark like that without ever having bothered to learn enough about ratpeople to know that she couldn't get pregnant unless she was in season. Unlike human women. And she hadn't yet gone into season, except once, her first time, under rigorously controlled conditions, with her mother and some older sisters there to make sure nothing untoward happened.

"After the first time any ratgirl with half a brain can manage her schedule. I go to the same apothecaries human women do. And the same hedge wizards." Singe rolled up her left sleeve, showed me a fancy yarn amulet not unlike those worn by every human female I knew who'd passed the age of nine. This is a cruel, wicked, unpredictable, and exciting world. Bad things happen to good girls. Good things happen to bad girls. Nobody with any sense risks having her life shattered by chance joy or evil.

Which isn't to say that there aren't scores of accidents happening out there every day. Common sense isn't.