Emma Bull (22 page)
Authors: Finder
He contemplated the glass of water, his lean face grave. "This is difficult," he said at last.
I decided that wasn't my hint.
He pursed his lips, as if he'd come to an unsavory decision, and raised his eyes to mine again. "You see, I'd ask a boon of you, but there I'm stopped. I cannot frame its nature. How may you grant what I've not craft to ask?"
After working that one over for a second, I said, "I see."
A quick, surprising smile lit his face. "Or at least, you see you cannot see, if I cannot be more plain. This touches on my partner."
I jumped, but only internally; and I wondered why I had. "I don't think there's much I can do for you there."
"You have done, if not much, then some at least already."
"I have?"
Linn shook his head, impatient, and coughed again. "She will not have you longer on this case. She will not countenance it, even to discuss. And yet, I think she held great hope of you, of what your skills might bring into the light. She seems now as if all her hope is fled, but will not, when I ask her, have it
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so. She i
s my friend; I cannot see her thus."
I wanted to tell him how many times I'd seen friends with troubled minds, and felt I had to do something about it, and did, and made it worse. But that was one of life's little lessons that was best learned through on-the-job training, anyway. And maybe in this instance he was right. "So you want me to go back to work for you and not let her know?"
"I'd not serve her such a turn. She has forbidden it, and I'll not go behind her to have it done in secret, nor above her, to have it ordered done in her despite. Still, if it were done, and no one had the ordering of it…"
"Except me, of course," I said, because I really did see, this time. "You want us to have never had this conversation, and me to go on sticking my nose into places where it's likely to get blown off in the hopes of finding this illusionist, and Rico to have nobody to yell at for it, if she finds out I'm doing it, but yours truly."
Linn smothered another cough and studied the tabletop. "Put so, I would deny it if I could. But no, that is the meat and bone of it."
"You could have saved yourself all that scansion. I never meant to quit on Rico's say-so." All right, I'd thought I meant to, for a few hours the day before, but nobody but me believed it anyway, so I wasn't counting it.
He stared at me. I think he was halfway between grateful and guilty, which is an unenviable piece of real estate. "You will… the danger will be great."
I quirked the eyebrow that didn't have stitches in it.
He looked away and rubbed his eyes. "If I can, I'll help. Take no foolhardy chances; you're to seek information, not to act."
I stood up. "If I'm not working for you, it's not your business how the job gets done. Your partner would understand that."
Linn stood up, too, more slowly than I had, as if he were the bruised and battered one. "She does, I think, and the reverse as well, which may be why she will not now employ you. Good day, and thank you for your help."
I watched him go. He took polite leave of the Ticker as he passed the workbench.
She stayed where she was until we heard the elevator squeak. Then she ambled up to the kitchen level and put the heat on under the teakettle. "How are you doing, my dear?"
Except for the head wound, and feeling mostly as if I'd been kicked down a long flight of stairs, I was fine.
When I said so to the Ticker, she sighed and asked, "Very well, then; what's the plan?"
"I haven't made one yet," I said, since I knew denying it would be a waste of time. I hoisted myself back onto the window sill.
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"Tell me when you have, then. Because if you try to tiptoe off and indulge
in heroi
cs by yourself, I shall
have you change
d into something. Something slow." She considered. "Which wouldn't be so much
of a
change, now that I think on it."
"Ha. Ha. Did you hear any of the stuff that Linn said to me?"
"I very carefully did not."
"Did he send you away? I didn't notice him doing it."
"Not really. He was uncomfortable, so I made to wander off, and he didn't stop me. If he'd asked me to sit back down, I would have tried to make you go away, unless he made it clear that he was simply uncomfortable with what he had to do, and that we were both welcome to attend on his discomfort."
"Well, there was some to attend on. Rico officially tossed me off the job. Linn has unofficially asked me if I couldn't find it in my heart to be curious enough about the case to go on working on it privately."
"Did you tell him you didn't need a hobby?"
"No. I told him I had every intention of continuing to dig up dirt on this. Which you already knew, so don't try to look surprised."
"I am much too lazy to feign anything so difficult as surprise at what you'll do next. You're angry, aren't you?"
My forehead itched under the bandage; I pressed it a little, knowing that wouldn't really help. "I guess I am."
"Linn made you so?"
"It's—yeah. I don't—I can't really explain why, even."
"No, I expect you can't, though you would never consider doing what he's done, and if you were accused of doing so, you would think it a blow to your honor."
I haven't hung out in Tick-Tick's company for so long that she can't, now and then, make me gape at her.
"I would, would I?"
"You wouldn't put it so. But indeed, my cabbage, our fine policeman's actions don't bear much scrutiny."
She sat down on the chair Linn had occupied and stretched her long legs out in front of her. "His partner has forbidden you to dabble further in this—the most probable reason being that she doesn't care for the thought of waking up some morning and finding that all your recoverable parts can be stored in a space the size of a post office box. She, at least, recognizes the difference between choosing to risk her own life and choosing to suggest someone else risk his."
"Now here's Linn, who doubts his partner's judgement. Instead of confronting her with his doubt, arguing the matter over with her, and abiding by the decision, he comes away in this furtive fashion to undermine what she has done. He does not hide from you that he doubts his partner. He does not want to accept responsibility for it if you defy Rico and continue the search. And he has offered you nothing but a share in his guilt. Your successes will be the hole-in-corner successes of the informer; your failures
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will be described as just what one
would expect from an amateur; and your death, if it
happens, will not
be ca
lled a hero's death but the sordid result of your own folly."
The teakettle was working up to a good kazoo-like hum. I grinned down at Tick-Tick and eased myself off the window sill. "You're pissed at him for reminding you you're an elf."
"You think I'm too hard on him?"
"Yeah." I turned the gas off and peered into the teapot. "Are these leaves okay to use again?"
"Blessed Mab, they most certainly are not. You may be as slovenly as you like in your own house, but in mine you'll make a decent pot of tea. Use the last of the Darjeeling."
I scraped the old leaves into the compost, rinsed the pot with a little hot water from the kettle, and left the new leaves to steep before I returned to the question of Linn. "Okay, he's running roughshod over a couple of my principles, but he's doing it in the interests of the public good, at least. He wants to get this guy."
"Bring the pot to the table, or you'll forget it, and we'll have cold paint thinner to drink. 'Good' is a somewhat differently-shaped concept on the other side of the Border. One may pursue one's own good: that is simple wisdom, a care for one's own well-being. If one extends that care to the well-being of those one loves—the good of friends and family—one is admired as above the common in honor and in duty, as having an ardent soul. But the public good? There is no ardency in that, no romance; the well-being of unknown persons does not touch upon fey honor nor the fey heart."
"It touches you."
"I am a changeling."
"Mmm. But Linn
does
want to catch the illusionist."
"Of course. As he would want to win at tourney. And he does have an ardent soul—the distress of his partner causes him distress. But there is no abstract desire in him, as there is in you, or in Rico."
"You think he's not a changeling, too?" I asked her.
"Why would he be?"
"He moved to Bordertown."
Tick-Tick raised her hand, acknowledging the point. "We are all changelings. All the more reason, however, not to judge him or anyone by yourself."
I looked out at the ragged line of buildings, trees, and fences that made up the town as seen from Tick-Tick's kitchen window. "Hey, does it work the other way?"
"Pardon?"
"If people don't think much of the concept of a general good, over the Border, does that mean they don't think in terms of public evils, either?"
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She frowne
d and poured out the tea. Then she answered, "Some do. Changelings of another sort, my
And changelings, as I'd pointed out, gravitated to Bordertown. I sighed. "I wish I knew what to do next."
"Have you tried simply looking for the wretched stuff?"
"Huh?"
"This drug. Have you been on its trail long enough to know what it is, and
that
it is, so that you can simply lock on and find the nearest sample of it? Well, it might be a start," she added, when I stared at her in what must have been a pretty blank fashion.
"No—I mean, of course it would be. I just feel so stupid for not—except I probably couldn't have done it until recently." What I'm trying to find has to be real to me. What the specifications of "real" are varies from item to item, but I knew the drug Rico was worried about was real to me now, because I'd seen the girl in the hospital bed. All I had to want to know was where to find a sample of the drug that had killed her. So I wanted that.
Nothing happened. It was as if I'd tried to find the man in the moon; there just wasn't anything. Tick-Tick was looking at me, hopefully.
"Maybe I'm broken," I offered.
"What?"
"Do you have any chocolate?"
"Yes, it's—"
"Don't tell me." Question. Answer. "If it's in the cupboard over the spoons, on the shelf next to the honey, I'm not broken."
"Then you don't know this drug well enough to find it after all?"
I shook my head. "I know it. Has the supply dried up? This is creepy."
She gazed out the window past my head. She looked irritable—unexpectedly so, and I realized that she'd decided this really was her business. "How do we find out?"
" 'We?'"
"Yes, 'we.' Don't make trouble for yourself."
