Free Angry Lead Skies by Glen Cook Page B

activities. Reliance believes that Pular Singe belongs to him. There’s a chance he’s right within the rules of rat society. There is some sort of indenture involved. But rat society isn’t paramount in TunFaire. And that guy Garrett don’t much care about anybody’s customs or rules when he makes up his mind what’s right and what’s wrong.
    “She wouldn’t be real happy about the boss rat getting his paws on her again, Garrett,” Tharpe assured me. With a wink, showing he’d gotten it. “He tried to hire me once to bring her back.” He grinned a grin filled with bad teeth.
    Well. Maybe I was going to get some help with this after all, from the least likely source.
    Saucerhead really can be a sensitive kind of guy.
    And Singe, wonder of wonders, was stirring suddenly.
    “So why didn’t you take the job?”
    “Old Reliance, he’s too damned cheap for one thing. He just can’t get it through his head that it ain’t just a matter of rounding up one dumb female and dropping her off where he wants her delivered. He can’t get it through his skull that she can actually think for herself and that she can have made friends who’d be willing to look out for her. He just figures you’re trying to hold him up on your fee when you try to explain it to him.”
    “You’d think he’d have figured it all out from direct experience. Whoops! Look here. It’s alive. Hi, sleepyhead. You’re the last one awake.”
    Singe mumbled something.
    “We’re just waiting on you.”
    Singe smiled a weak rat smile. She probably thought she heard relief in my voice. Possibly she did. I was relieved that her problem wasn’t real.
    Pular Singe’s recovery was dramatically swift once she decided that she needed to get healthy. Reliance’s name made a great whip.
    Morley told one of his waiters to make a bread and cheese run while the rest of us sat around staking claims on being in worse shape than the other guy. Food was a great idea, I thought, but when the man came back with a basket filled with chow I didn’t feel much like eating.
    A similar lack of appetite afflicted Saucerhead, Playmate, and Singe. And none of those three liked it even a little, either. They loved their food. Singe, in particular, always ate like a starved alley cat or one of her feral cousins. Everything in sight, steadily, gobbling so fast that the bugs never got a share.
    I grumbled, “I think we’ve got us an invention right here. A new weight loss program for the lords and ladies.” Nobody else in this burg ever gets fat.
    Soon enough, heads still aching and stomachs still empty, we proceeded as Singe picked up Kip’s trail. Though it had begun to get dark she had no trouble finding the way. Sight was never her master sense. Though it did become more important after nightfall. She could see in the dark better than Morley. And Morley has eyes like an owl.
    This time the chase didn’t last twenty minutes.
    This time the camouflage didn’t catch us unaware, either, though it existed as an addition to a building rather than as something thrown across a street. From the viewpoint of the silver elves the trouble was that the building they’d scabbed onto was one that Saucerhead and I knew. And had we not known it ourselves there were at least twenty local Tenderloin folk hanging around in the gloaming trying to figure out what was going on. That addition hadn’t been there half an hour earlier.
    Playmate observed, “These people aren’t very good at what they’re doing, are they?”
    “I get the feeling that this isn’t anything they’ve had to do before. What do you say we just charge in there and grab the kid back?” I wasn’t eager to get myself another bout of sleep because of my habit of waking up afterward with a ferocious hangover. I didn’t need another one of those. I was working on a couple already.
    Still, they had the boy. Obnoxious though he was. Which didn’t incline them to throw him back out, apparently. They wanted him