Free Angry Lead Skies by Glen Cook

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.
     
     

13
    Morley Dotes was right there in my face again when I woke up. “Some kind of party you must throw, Garrett. Blitzed into extinction again. And the sun still hasn’t gone down.” He looked around as I tried to sit up. My head pounded worse than before. “But in an alley? Even if it is a pretty clean one for this burg?”
    “Gods! My head! I don’t know what they did to me but it’s enough to make me consider giving up liquor.”
    “You give up your beer? Don’t try to kid a kidder, kid.”
    “I said liquor, nimrod. Beer is a holy elixir. One shuns beer only at the risk of one’s immortal soul. I see you’re all freshly prettied up. How’d you find us?”
    Two of Morley’s henchmen had accompanied him. I didn’t know them. They were clad in the outfits waiters at The Palms usually wear but they were much younger than Sarge and Puddle and Morley’s other traditional associates. Maybe the old guys were getting too old.
    “Your girlfriend left us a trail to follow. Standard rat chalk symbols. You didn’t notice? A trained detective like you?”
    Pride made me consider fibbing. “No. I didn’t. Not really.” Ten years ago I couldn’t have admitted any failing. Which, at times, had left me looking just a whole lot stupider than a simple confession would’ve done.
    People are strange. And sometimes I think I might be the strangest people I know.
    Morley’s boys didn’t lift a finger to help anybody. Dotes himself didn’t do anything but talk. Which told me he thought none of us had been hurt badly. “What happened to the illusion?”
    “What illusion?”
    I explained. Morley wanted to disbelieve but dared not in the face of Saucerhead’s confirmation. Tharpe doesn’t have the imagination to dress himself up with excuses as complex as this.
    “So you scared them into running when they’re not really up to it. They have two casualties and a prisoner to manage.”
    “We don’t know that any of them were hurt.”
    “Yes, we do, Garrett. Use that brain the Dead Man thinks you have. If they don’t have someone injured they don’t have any reason not to just drag the kid straight off to wherever it is they want to take him. Let’s get back on the trail. They can’t have gone far.”
    Maybe he was right. Maybe the villains were just around the corner. But I didn’t have any way to track them. Right now.
    Singe was still out, stone cold.
    “I wonder if they understand how we found them.” I was afraid the