Dread Brass Shadows Read Online Free Page A

carrying a weapon that clashes.
    Everything was in tip-top shape I couldn’t work off any nervous energy sharpening and polishing. I eyeballed the ensemble. Nothing I had was worth much in a scrimmage with crossbowmen.
    I did have a few little bottles left over from the time I’d done undercover work for the Grand Inquisitor. I took the case down, looked inside Three bottles, one emerald, one royal blue, one ruby, each about two ounces. You threw them. Once they broke, the stuff inside took the fight right out of guys. The contents of the red one would melt the flesh off their bones I was saving that for somebody who really got on my nerves. If I ever used it, I’d have to stand back a ways.
    I put the case away, secreted knives all over me, hung the longest tool legal on my belt, then took down my most useful all-round instrument, an oaken headthumper eighteen inches long. It had a pound of lead inside the business end. It did wonders making me more convincing when I got into an argument
    So what was I going to do now? Go looking for some villains, just on general principles? Sure. Right. The way my luck runs, I’d have a building fall on me before I found any bad boys to astonish and dismay.
    I managed to kill time till supper came along. I spent most of it trying to figure out why I was restless and uneasy. Tinnie had been hurt, but she was going to make it. Saucerhead and I had—sort of—dissuaded her attacker from becoming a repeat offender. Everything had turned out all right. Things were going to be fine.
    Sure.
     
     

6
     
    I didn’t get much sleep that night.
    It was a time of weirdness for TunFaire, maybe because of the weather. The whole world had turned cockeyed, not just me with my running and my going to bed early so I could get up before anybody sane was oriented vertically. Mammoths had been seen from the city wall. Saber-tooth tigers were at large within a day’s travel. There were rumors of werewolves. There were rumors of thunder-lizards being sighted near KirtchHeis, just sixty miles north of TunFaire, two hundred south of their normal range. To our south, centaurs and unicorns, fleeing ferocious fighting in the Cantard, had penetrated Karentine territory Every night, here in the city, the sky filled with squabbling morCartha, weird creatures who traditionally confined their brawls to rain-forested valleys on the marches of thunder-lizard country.
    Where the morCartha disappeared during the day no one knew—nobody gave a big enough care to find out—but all night they zoomed over the rooftops settling old tribal scores or swooped down to mug citizens or to steal anything not nailed down. Most people accepted their presence as proof the thunder-lizards were migrating. In their own country morCartha lived in the treetops and slept during the day. That would make them easy snacks for the taller thunder-lizards Some of these stand more than thirty feet tall.
    Despite the morning’s excitement I tried going to bed at what Dean and the Dead Man perversely call a reasonable hour. My theory was that if I rolled out early, my neighbors wouldn’t be out to giggle and point at the spectacle of Garrett running laps. But that night the morCartha brought their flying carnival to my neighborhood. It sounded like the aerial battle of the century. Blood and broken bodies and war cries and taunts rained down. Whenever I threatened to drift off, they staged some absurd, cacophonous confrontation right outside my window.
    I decided it was time somebody on the Hill suffered a stroke of smarts and enlisted them all as mercenaries and sent them down to the Cantard to look for Glory Mooncalled. Let him lose sleep while they squabbled over his head.
    Old Glory probably wasn’t getting much sleep, anyway. The Karentine powers that be had thrown everything into the cauldron down there They were grinding his upstart republic fine, inexorably and inevitably, permitting him no chance to catch his breath and turn his