Singe was spot on about whispering. But she was a tad off when it came to who would do the eavesdropping.
Yikes! Here came Bic Gonlit and his threadbare stormwarden buddy, hustling like they were being driven by one of the wizard's spooky winds. Their trackers and henchmen scampered along behind them, confused and alert and able to keep up only because Bic had those stubby little pins.
The flotilla's course ran straight toward me.
I poked Singe, indicated that she should peek through the airhole. Once she'd done so we got up on our hind feet and, chest to chest, in careful lockstep, began to ease along the brick wall, toward the cover of another mound of hides. We found it necessary to freeze every few steps because the Visitors had become extremely nervous, suddenly. They were inclined to jump at the slightest sound.
They had to suspect that they had trouble in their hip pocket.
Several Visitors, fetishes extended before them, suddenly rushed the hide pile Singe and I had abandoned. Bic and his cohorts were causing a disturbance outside. And Singe and I hadn't gotten but a dozen feet away. So we froze. And shivered. And held our breaths. And hoped nobody stumbled into us.
The Visitor with his arm in a sling missed running into me by scant inches.
Tension mounted amongst the Visitors. The advent of danger reawakened the bad feelings between the Maskers and Kip's pals. I could sense just enough to tell that the Maskers blamed Lastyr and Noodiss for everything. Kip's friends blamed the Maskers for zipping all over the sky, thereby alerting the savages to their presence.
Lastyr and Noodiss had abandoned the altruism that had brought them to TunFaire. In fact, prolonged exposure to our fair flower of a city had turned them bitter and cynical.
Imagine that.
Singe and I continued to move, teensy baby steps, then with more vigor once we realized that the people outside intended to come inside.
Visitors began flying all over the place. Two quite literally. I didn't see any ropes or wires. "Keep moving," I told Singe, in what I thought would be an inaudible whisper.
Visitors froze.
Something had changed. The Visitors were alert in a whole different way.
The Visitors then unfroze, every man jack getting busy with fetish boxes.
Those guys needed bandoliers to carry all the fetishes they had. Evidently every task imaginable could be managed with the right gray box.
Two Visitors headed our way, weaving slow, serpentine courses, zeroing in.
Bic's gang poured through the open door.
Big surprises happened. For everybody.
The confusion attained an epic level.
At first it looked like it would be a walk for the startled Visitors. Thugs went down left and right, exactly as easily as I had in my first several encounters with Masker magic.
Then Bic came through the doorway.
The Visitor sorcery didn't affect Little Bitty Big Boy.
Bic selected a paddle meant for stirring the contents of a curing vat. He took a swing at the nearest silver figure, which happened to belong to the Masker with the broken leg.
The Visitor rewarded Bic with a beaten-sheep sort of bleat.
The shabby stormwarden stepped inside. And instantly called down some of that old-fashioned thunder and lightning, the ability to control which gave stormwardens their name.
Weather magic is the flashiest and most obviously destructive power possessed by our lords of the Hill—and the most common.
Hides flew. Vats exploded. People shrieked. Bic Gonlit rose ten feet into the air, spinning faster and faster as he did so. The stormwarden followed, spinning himself. But he threw off spells like the sparks coming off one of those pinwheel fireworks.
I told Singe, "We really need to take ourselves somewhere else."
The game looked like it was just starting to get serious.
"I thought you wanted to find the Visitors... "
"We found them. Now let's take advantage of the fact that nobody here has us at the head of their to-do list right now."
80
Pixies flitted around us, giggling and squabbling, more annoying than a flock of starving mosquitoes. Not a single one had anything useful to say. Their presence didn't help anything. Singe and I weren't invisible anymore. There was no need.
Nobody was interested in us. But the squawking bugs threatened to attract attention.
For the gawkers, trying to figure out what was happening in the slowly collapsing tannery, a guy hanging out with a ratwoman bold enough to walk the streets by daylight was a secondary spectacle.
Threads of blue light as thin as spider silk crawled over the ruins. The entire heap of rubble hurled itself skyward. Everything inside went up with the building itself. People and debris alike floated on the surface of an expanding, invisible bubble.
More time seemed to pass than actually did.
The bubble popped. And collapsed.
A raindrop smacked me in the cheek. I noted that a cold breeze had begun blowing. The change in weather wasn't unseasonable or unlikely, it was just a surprise because I hadn't been paying attention.
Vigorous lightning pranced over the remains of the tannery. One bolt struck something explosive, probably chemicals used for treating leather. The explosion scattered brick and broken timbers for a hundred yards around. A spinning sliver sixteen inches long flew between Singe and me, narrowly missing us both.
Singe said, "We have found them. Do we really need to stay so close, now?"
"I don't know. You may have a point." I spied a dirty white behind wagging as somebody struggled to back his way out of the mess. When the pile finally finished birthing Bic it developed that he had hold of his employer by the ankle. He strove to drag the wizard out by main strength.
I said, "I think we might move a little farther away."
Lightning bolts, like swift left and right jabs, rained down on the ruins, starting small fires, flinging debris around. Despite his discomfiture and the inelegance of his situation the stormwarden was still in there punching.
Other things were happening at the same time. They were less intensely visual. I credited them to the Visitors because Bic's gang were the people being inconvenienced.
Damn! We'd dropped the invisibility spell and were trying to fade into the onlookers but Bic spotted us almost immediately. But he didn't get the chance to report us. A Visitor floated up out of the ruins, jabbed one of those gray fetishes in his direction. And he fell down, sound asleep. I wasn't feeling real charitable. I hoped he woke up with a headache as ferocious as the worst I'd enjoyed back when they were knocking me out all day long.
I told Singe, "It'll be a week before they get their stuff together back there. Let's use the time."
We did. To no avail whatsoever. Not only were the Maskers not hiding where John Stretch said, there was no sign of their skyship. I'd hoped it would be right there where I could sabotage it. Or whatever seemed appropriate at the moment of discovery.
Why would I want to keep them from going away? The longer they hung around the more likely they would fall into the hands of somebody off the Hill. Which would make times just that much more interesting for those of us who couldn't fly away.
"Singe? You smell anything that might be the Masker skyship?"
She strained valiantly. And told me, "I can tell nothing. What happened back there has blinded my nose."
Poor baby. "Follow me." It was time to get the hell away from the Embankment.
Our line of retreat took us back past the ruined tannery.
Raindrops continued to strike randomly, scattered but getting fatter all the time. And colder. One smacked me squarely atop the bean. It contained a core of ice. It stung. I regretted my prejudice against hats.
"Look," Singe said. We were slinking through the crowd of onlookers, which had swollen to scores, most of them tickled to see a stormwarden looking like he had a firm grip on the dirty end of the stick.