37

Somebody knocked on the door with a battering ram. Plaster dust fell all over the house. The pounding didn’t stop. Dean came roaring out of the kitchen armed with a cleaver, ready to offer somebody some advanced training in etiquette. He beat me to the door. He was in such an evil temper that he opened the door without first using the peephole.

“Gah!”

Who would’ve thought a man that old could jump that far? And backward at that, while inscribing sagas on the air with the edge of his lightning cleaver.

I caught him “Hey! Maybe you want to settle down. Before you damage the woodwork. It can’t be all that bad.”

“I’m all right,” Dean insisted right away. “They just caught me by surprise.”

An odor wafted in through the open doorway, like the southern extremity of a northbound skunk or, more likely, the last thing you smell when you meet up with one of the big flesh-eating thunder lizards out in the woods. It was bad breath on an epic scale. I hadn’t encountered it in a long time but I knew it of old. Its provenance was just coming back to me when I got up to the door and leaned out just in time to get the full benefit of the exhalations of a pair of humongous creatures who’d bent down to peer into my house.

These boys both fell out of the ugly tree at a young age, hitting every damned branch on the way down. Then their mommas whupped them with an ugly stick and fed them ugly soup every day of their lives. They were Uh-glee, with a couple of capital double-ugs.

“Doris. Marsha. How’re you fellas doing?”

Doris and Marsha Rose were two of three brothers who insisted they were triplets born of different mothers. Doris and Marsha have a greenish cast and stand twenty feet tall. They have teeth that stick out all which way. One is crosseyed and one is walleyed but I can’t keep that straight. Sometimes they trade off. They’re grolls, a seldom-seen result of what can happen when giants and trolls fall in love. Doris and Marsha aren’t very bright. But they don’t have to be. They’re so big hardly anything else matters.

“We’re all doing marvellously, actually,” a small voice piped. Of course. The grolls seldom went anywhere without the third triplet, Dojango, who, being a half-wit, was the brains of the family.

Dojango Rose isn’t much over five feet tall. Well, taller than Bic Gonlit, so maybe he’s five and a half. He’s indistinguishable from a thousand other weasel-eyed, furtive little grifters on the streets of TunFaire. He’d have no trouble passing for human if he wanted, though he can’t be more than one-eighth human in reality. In some fashion he’s distantly related to Morley Dotes. Morley tosses snippets of work his way when finesse and a low profile aren’t critical components in the grand scheme.

I descended the front steps amidst booming greetings from the larger brethren and the worst carrying-on by the pixies since their own arrival. I barely noticed. Already their hell-raising was becoming a commonplace, part of the background noise of the city. Seldom is TunFaire completely quiet.

Dojango Rose had himself in harness between the shafts of Kip Prose’s two-wheeler man-hauling cart. He grinned. “Bet this’s something you never thought you’d see, actually.”

“Actually. You really think you can haul that thing around town with somebody in it?” Dojango seemed to have gone a few rounds with consumption since last I’d seen him. He looked lucky to be able to shift himself.

Based on prior experience chances were good he had his brothers carrying him most of the time.

“I am kind of counting on my brothers to help, actually,” Rose admitted. “But there’s more to me than you think, actually.”

“Actually.” Dojango Rose had some annoying verbal tics. “There just about has to be. Hey! Knock it off! Let her go.”

Doris unpinched thumb and forefinger. A pixie buzzed away in dazed, staggering flight.

Amazing. Some people will respond automatically to any loud, commanding voice.

“Ah, Garrett, I was just—”

“I know what you was just.” I climbed into the cart, every muscle arguing back. “Save it for the villains. We’re liable to run into some. Godsdammit!”

There I was in the street about a thousand steps downhill from my front door and I hadn’t brought anything out with me . . . Dean and Singe materialized, each with arms filled. They clattered down the steps. Singe dumped her load into my lap. That consisted of enough instruments of mayhem for me to start up my own small army.

Singe and Dean stayed busy around the back of the cart for a while, with trips into the house and outside again. Then the old man headed back up the steps. Eventually, Singe came up beside me. “We are ready to travel.” She tossed Dean a cheerful wave. Dean returned the gesture.

She had outstubborned him and overcome his prejudice by force of personality. Singe was, indeed, a wonder girl.

“What were you doing back there?”

“Storing provisions. You do not plan your travels properly. Especially in the area of food. So Dean and I fixed us something to take along.”

While I was digesting that Dojango suddenly called out, “Where to, boss?”