Saucerhead’s impatient pacing took him across the narrow street and back three times as he tried to establish a safe passage around a particularly irritable camel. No owner of the beast was in evidence. I was surprised to see it. Camels are rare this far south. Possibly no one would have this one. Possibly it had been abandoned. It was a beast as foul as the Goddamn Parrot. It voided its bowels, then nipped at Saucerhead. I muttered, “That’s what I feel like right now.”
“Which end?” Singe asked, testing her theory of humor. She giggled. So bold, this ratgirl who came out in the daytime, then dared to make jokes in front of human beings.
“Take your pick. You know what that thing really is? A horse without its disguise on.”
Even Singe thought that was absurd. And she has less love for the four-legged terrors than I do. You could say a state of war, of low intensity, exists between her species and theirs. Horses dislike ratpeople more than most humans do.
Playmate said, “One day I fully expect to find you on the steps of the Chancery, between Barking Dog Amato and Woodie Granger, foaming at the mouth as you rant at the King and the whole royal family because they’re pawns of the great equine conspiracy, Garrett.”
The Chancery is a principal government building where, traditionally, anyone with a grievance can voice it publicly on the outside steps. Inevitably, the Chancery steps have acquired a bevy of professional complainers and outright lunatics. Most people consider them cheap entertainment.
I said, “You shouldn’t talk about it! They’re going to get you now.” Singe started looking worried, frowning. “All right. Maybe I exaggerate a little. But they’re still vicious, nasty critters. They’ll turn on you in a second.”
The resident nasty critter spit at Saucerhead. Saucerhead responded with a jab to the camel’s nose. It was a calm, professional blow of the sort that earned him his living. But he put his weight and muscle behind it. The camel rocked back. Its eyes wobbled. Its front knees buckled.
Tharpe said, “Come on.” Once we were past the camel, he added, “Sometimes polite ain’t enough. You just gotta show’em who’s boss.”
We walked another hundred feet. And stopped. The street didn’t go anywhere. It ended at a wall. Which was improbable.
“What the hell?” Saucerhead demanded. “When did we start blocking off streets?”
He had a point. TunFaire has thousands of dead-end alleys and breezeways but something that happened in antiquity made our rulers issue regulations against blocking thoroughfares. Possibly because they’d wanted to be able to make a run for it in either direction. And while what we were following wasn’t much of a street, it was a street officially. Complete with symbols painted on walls at intersections to indicate that its name was something like Stonebone. Exactly what was impossible to tell. The paint hadn’t been renewed in my lifetime.
The wall ahead was old gray limestone. Exactly like the wall to our left. Needing the attention of a mason just as badly. But something about it made all four of us nervous.
“It sure don’t look like something somebody threw up over the weekend,” I said. Believe it or not, some Karentine subjects are wicked enough to ignore established regulations and will construct something illegal while the city functionaries are off duty.
Nobody stepped up to the wall. Until Singe snorted the way only a woman can do when she’s exasperated with men being men. She shuffled right up till her pointy big nose was half an inch from the limestone. “The track of the boy goes straight on, Garrett. And this wall smells almost the same as the odor I found where the two elves fell on one another.”
Playmate took a few steps backward, found a bit of broken brick that hadn’t yet been scrounged by the street children. (They sell brick chips and chunks back to the brickyards, where they’re powdered and added to the clay of new bricks.) He started to wind up, but paused and said, “Garrett, have you bothered to look up?”
I hadn’t. Why would I?
None of the others had, either.
We all looked now.
That wall wasn’t part of anything. It might not even be stone. It just went up a ways, then turned fuzzy and wiggly and lizard’s belly white. Then it turned misty. Then it turned into nothing.
“It’s an illusion.”
Playmate chucked his brickbat.
The missile proceeded to proceed despite the presence of a wall that appeared completely solid, if improbably cold and damp when I extended a cautious finger to test it. Saucerhead Tharpe isn’t nearly as careful as Mama Garrett’s only surviving son. He reached out to thump that wall. And his fist went right on through.
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.