Wicked Bronze Ambition: A Garrett, P.I., Novel (2 page)

Strafa’s dau
ghter, Kevans, let us in. Kevans has a lot of her father in her. She isn’t as slim or beautiful as Strafa. And she insists on being sixteen going on fifty around her mother. “Mom! You two are worse than a cage full of ferrets. You’re
old
! Can’t you at least pretend to act your age?”

Old is a matter of viewpoint. Strafa was thirty-one, which made for interesting generational math. I ignored it. I ignore the weird Algarda dynamic as much as they let me.

I kept my mouth shut. If I stuck even one finger into the daughter-mother competition, I’d get my arm ripped off and fed to me after one or the other beat me with it.

Yes. The family was the downside to being engaged to the most wonderful, perfect, ridiculously beautiful, loving woman in the world. There was no getting out of having the in-laws included in the package.

Kevans and I get along fine when her mother isn’t around. I get along with their father when Kevans and Strafa aren’t around. Barate is a smart guy. He really thinks that I’m the best thing ever to happen to Strafa—though it didn’t always used to be that way.

Nobody gets along with Grandmother Shadowslinger.

She works hard to make it that way. I am assured, however, that she thinks well of me. As well as is possible, she being Shadowslinger. My most endearing trait was that I was willing to make an honest woman of her spinster granddaughter.

Strafa asked Kevans, “What kind of mood is she . . . ? Right. Stipulated. Stupid question.”

“Foul. But not because of anything any of us did, for once.”

Like most of the more ferocious magic-users who dwell on the Hill, Constance Algarda, commonly called Shadowslinger, occupied a vast, gloomy, dark edifice that looked like ghouls and graveyard fetches had thrown it up more than two hundred years ago. A parade of grim residents had installed countless bad smells, dire dust, spiders with webbed accessories, and lots of random clutter. Shadowslinger was not famous for her housekeeping. She was not your cliché tubby little rosy-cheeked homemaker kind of grandmother.

Most of the smells actually existed only inside my imagination, but Shadowslinger had fixed them there—while wearing a big, greasy, evil grin. A reminder, she said, never making it clear of what. One odor I never failed to catch was that of rotting flesh. It seeped out of the very walls.

Nobody else ever smelled it.

“She does it because she cares,” Strafa said. “What do you want to bet she makes it go away after the wedding?” Her eyes were big and blue and filled with self-deluding optimism.

I hunch my shoulders and take what I have to take. It’s the price of admission to paradise.

Kevans told us we should follow her, then complained every step of the way till we reached the room where Shadowslinger waited. Then the girl actually smiled for a moment.

Kevans likes her grandmother, though I’ve never heard her say a good word about the hag.

I was startled. St
rafa squeaked. She was surprised, too.

Shadowslinger was not alone.

I’d never visited this room. It was big and comfortable and more civilized than any I’d yet seen inside Shadowslinger’s suburb of Hell. There wasn’t a single torture device, nor even one torturee, in sight. There were rich carpets, richer tapestries, big, ridiculously comfortable chairs, and massive furniture. A fire roared enthusiastically in a fireplace behind Grandmother, who was old enough to be convinced that she was cold all the time. A brace of servants in livery tended to the needs of her guests. I knew Barate, my father-in-law-to-be. He had been half devoured by a monster chair. He had a bone china teacup to his lips when we entered.

He had a relationship with his mother that was as difficult as Kevans’s was with her mother. Every little motion he made mocked her unusual efforts toward propriety.

There were another three people present. They were all older than me. Two were older than Barate and might be as old as Shadowslinger herself. I didn’t know them. Strafa did. She loosed a little gasp of surprise. I whispered, “Is this good or bad?”

Her right hand slipped into my left, trembling. “All of the above.”

A lean man, balding, six feet tall, stood about that far to the left of Shadowslinger. He was armed with another bone china cup. He had an upper-crust attitude on, but his clothing was workaday. He would attract no attention on the street.

Nearby, as though trying to take reassurance from that man’s presence without becoming personally involved, was a woman of an age well beyond the thirty-something she artfully strove to project. She was tall, thin to the verge of emaciation, equally plainly dressed but from a high-end source. My first thought was that her hair should be short and silver-gray instead of a grand profusion of chestnut curls.

The final guest occupied a chair like Barate’s, a few feet from Algarda. Unlike the others, he seemed comfortable.

A friend of the family.

I looked no closer because Shadowslinger had begun to respond to our arrival.

The ugly old tub of goo was scary just sitting there, behind a massive oak table a good four feet by eight. She would weigh in at three hundred pounds but was only five feet three inches tall on those occasions when she actually stood. She got around aboard a fleet of customized wheelchairs. Strafa said she hadn’t been able to stand and support her own weight for more than minutes for as long as she could remember. But Constance Algarda did not need to be a ballet diva. She was Shadowslinger, one of the darkest and most powerful Karentine sorcerers alive.

Rumor suggested that she never ate where she could be seen. I’d never seen her touch a bite, yet she kept on getting bigger.

Shadowslinger’s vast, wide mouth expanded into what she meant as a smile. She eyed me in a manner intended to be coquettish. My gorge rose. Gorge. Neat word. You don’t get to deploy it very often.

My dearly beloved growled, “Grandmother, behave. Father, be merciful. Tell us what’s going on. You’ve gotten poor Garrett out of bed six months before the crack of noon. You know how hard that is on him.”

Barate would do the talking. His mother liked it that way. That made everything creepier.

He sat up straight and slid to the edge of his chair. He extended his right hand, palm upward, toward the lean, bald man. “Richt Hauser.”

“Rich?” I said. He looked more like a Ned or a Newt.

“Richt.” Hardening on the end consonant. “Hauser.” With an “s” as in house, not as in hawser.

Strafa held my left arm with both hands. I was supposed to be impressed and maybe intimidated.

Richt Hauser did not so much as nod. That told me a lot about who he thought he was, which would be the most important man in the room.

Barate then indicated the woman. “Lady Tara Chayne Machtkess.”

Seemed I ought to know that name, at least the Machtkess part. She inclined her head in response to my bow, smiling thinly beneath narrowed, calculating eyes. I caught a whiff of something predatory. And, behind that, of something that might be a frightened little girl.

Barate shifted hands. He indicated the man in the other easy chair. “Kyoga Stornes. Often underfoot around here because he’s been my best friend since we were kids. But this time he’s here because he has some skin in the game.”

I knew the name. There were family legends about the adolescent adventures of Barate and Kyoga. At the moment Kyoga looked more like a victim than the perpetrator of malicious mischief.

Karma being a bitch?

Shadowslinger stirred impatiently. “Yes, Mother. Garrett, we need your expertise and resources.”

Remarkably polite. But these weren’t people I could tell to go away because I didn’t feel like working. Which I would never have to do as long as I remained hooked up with my wonder woman, Strafa.

“How so? In what way?”

Shadowslinger got some exercise by pointing at Hauser. Unhappily, Hauser reported, “Signs of preliminaries for a Tournament of Swords have begun to appear. We all have someone likely to be conscripted into the game.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Neither did Strafa. She asked, “What is a Tournament of Swords?”

Hauser’s instant response was irritation at being forced to explain. That morphed into an appreciation of the fact that this tournament business was not common knowledge even inside the highest levels of the sorcerer class. “Each few generations an uncertain supernatural process or power arises and compels a contest . . .”

He stopped. Emotion had cracked his cool. He struggled to regain his composure.

Barate took over. “What happens is, a bunch of talented people, usually kids, get chosen to participate. Most come from families in the sorcery business. They aren’t asked if they want in. They’re conscripted. They’re supposed to fight until only one is left. That one wins the prize, which is a device containing all of the power of the defeated contestants combined. Back when the tournament was devised, the families wanted that so badly they all signed on. The final prize, power, would make the winner a minor god.”

I glanced from face to
face. Nobody looked like they thought Algarda was pulling my leg. Kevans made a noise that sounded like a bleat of fear, which might be justified if this was on the up-and-up.

“No bullshit, Garrett. Those two have grandkids that could get pulled in. Kyoga’s son, Feder, seems to have gotten the news yesterday. Mother and I, naturally, are concerned for Kevans.”

“You’ve lost me and confused me. Somebody or something picks out kids . . . always Hill kids? And they have no choice?”

“Almost always members of the founding families. But some of those don’t exist anymore, as much because of the tournaments as anything, so brilliant outsiders get dragged in to make up the numbers. Or, even uglier, the summons can go out to more than one member of the same family.”

That would be cruel. “All right. Cream-of-the-crop kids. And they’re expected to murder one another until only one is left standing.”

“Yes.”

“Crap. How? Why? And how come the whole damned world doesn’t know about it if it happens all the time?”

Strafa asked, “How can they make them fight? If they don’t want to?”

I said, “That would be a good place to start. Yes.”

“You have no choice. Say you’re a pacifist and you refuse to participate. Someone will cut your throat just because you make it easy.”

“In other words, what it is is an exaggerated and formalized, gamed-up version of what goes on among the ruling class every day, anyway.”

That got me unpleasant looks from members of the ruling class.

Barate said, “Some will fight, always, for the prize or just to survive. Some will try to win so they can get strong enough to end the tournaments forever. Whatever, young people will die, some of them horribly. Not all of the victims will be people directly involved in the game. There’s usually a lot of collateral damage.”

“But the public doesn’t notice.”

“Mostly it doesn’t happen in public. It’s no gladiatorial contest, like a bare-knuckles boxing tournament. It’s a secret war that, by its nature, can’t help having public effects. It leaves corpses and localized disasters. Unexplained magical encounters in the night are common and often lethal.”

Not unusual for TunFaire, really, until recently. Lately the city has suffered gut-wrenching spasms of early-stage law and order.

Barate said, “There is evidence in the historical record if you look. You won’t need to dig for it. We’ll give you a big head start by letting you interview several participants from the last tournament.” He extended his hand to indicate Hauser, the Machtkess woman, and his mother.

Kyoga reported, “My father kept a journal detailing his efforts and that of his two Companions.”

“But . . .”

Hauser said, “Families were involved. Families hand down oral histories. We refused to play by the old rules. We sabotaged and aborted the tournament. We attacked the devil in charge instead of our friends. And we thought we had ended the tournaments forever.”

Lady Tara Chayne said, “We were wrong.”

I asked, “All of you?” Kyoga was Barate’s age.

Hauser said, “No. Meyness B. Stornes.”

Kyoga said, “I said my father. I was still in diapers.”

Hauser added, “Five of us rebelled. Meyness disappeared in the Cantard ten years later.”

All right. I looked from face to face. Sooner or later they would get around to explaining how they thought I fit. Sooner, I hoped. I was getting hungry. Strafa’s eyes had gone yellow with impatience. And Kevans was getting restless.

Hauser said, “We wrecked the last game because our grandparents got cut up bad in the round before that. That one didn’t work out according to plan, either, though we never found out why. Everyone involved died before they could explain. Some of us, though, were old enough to understand and friends enough not to want to kill each other over something that we didn’t believe was actually real.”

Lady Tara Chayne said, “There have been six tournaments, none of which went according to design. Something always went wrong, but a lot of people died anyway. When we were young we thought the whole thing might just be an entertainment for devils. I’m no longer as sure as Richt is that there’d never be an actual payoff, but I’m still set on ending the insanity.”

Hauser won no points by adding, “We’re all too old to benefit, anyway.”

Lady Machtkess said, “It’s easier to get in a killer mood when it’s your children at risk. When it’s you yourself, you don’t worry so much because when you’re a kid you know you’re invincible.”

Barate stepped in. “This time we want to abort the thing before it starts and keep on till we end it forever.”

I admitted, “I have to confess to being confused. I still don’t have any idea of who, what, or why.”

Lady Tara Chayne asked, “Isn’t that what you do, though, Mr. Garrett? Find answers? I’m told that you’re the best.” She looked over at Shadowslinger, one eyebrow raised. “Constance would have us believe that you’re a genius with a matchless network of shady connections. And that you’re more discreet than the Civil Guard.”

A rabid mammoth would be more discreet than those guys.

Somebody had been telling tall tales. That it might be Shadowslinger astonished me. She seldom showed anything but contempt. “True.” Barely.

A double-hand squeeze on my left arm hinted that it might be in my interest to talk less and listen more, a skill I have honed for decades with slight success.

Barate said, “Mother believes that the tournament will play out differently this time because it will be heavily influenced by survivors from before.”

“Um?”

“This round may begin with an effort by the Operators to remove those who helped scuttle it last time.”

I pointed a finger at Lady Tara Chayne, Hauser, and Shadowslinger, swinging left to right.

“Us. Yes. Exactly,” Hauser said. “We have been remiss, letting the matter slide for so long. We thought it was over forever. Or at least we hoped next time would hold off till after we were gone. But, honestly, some of us might admit fearing that it would come back to bite us someday.”

Madam Machtkess said, “Someday has come.”

I saw no arrogance here, only confidence and irritation at an outside force that dared try to use them. A common Hill attitude, actually. These were people grown old in treacherous environments.

“So, what shall I do with my special talents and outstandingly shady connections?” Carefully keeping my tone neutral. Strafa had hold of my arm, sending messages by squeezing brutally. In a way, she was thrilled that the man she had chosen, without consulting her elders, was now being welcomed to the family’s conspiratorial heartland.

Shadowslinger watched me as if she were cataloging recipes she wanted to try.

Barate said, “First, we should identify the contestants. If we round them up before the killing starts, the whole stupid competition will fall apart. Nobody will have to die.”

Hauser agreed. “We could save them all. And if we could identify the Operators . . .”

Shadowslinger summoned Barate close. She murmured into his ear. He then announced, “Mother has to leave us. She suggests that we all give Mr. Garrett whatever information we have so he can get started, especially with identifying the contestants.”

Right.

Cynical me, I wondered how much actual identifying and rounding up they really intended.