“You know who I am,” Doc said. “You know my reputation. These are the terms: You cooperate. I decide later what it’s worth to me. Lie to me and it’s not worth much. Give me the keys to the city and it can be worth a lot. That’s as explicit as it gets. Yes or no.”
The man said, “Yes.”
“Your name.”
“Swyn Alpson.”
“Who do you work for?”
“Aremorcy Waterways.”
“You’ve just insulted my intelligence.”
The man shifted, restless. “My boss is Eamon Moon. I do most of the work he’s responsible for. But Angus Powrie gives Moon orders, and he and Darig MacDuncan give each other orders. I don’t know which one is the boss, but Angus calls Darig ‘sir’ and Darig calls Angus things like ‘toad’ and ‘bug’.”
Harris leaned forward to interrupt: “ ‘Bug’? This Darig guy is the Changeling, then.”
Alpson nodded. “He calls himself that, yes.”
Doc said, “MacDuncan. ‘Duncan’s son.’ Is he?”
“I don’t know whose son he is.”
“Is Darig a deviser?”
“No. Don’t think so.”
“But you have a deviser in your gang.”
“No. Darig just gets packages with things in them. Books. Instructions. From a deviser. I don’t know who.”
“Does Darig show any sign of any Gift?”
“No.”
“Why do you call him the Changeling, then?”
Alpson shrugged. “He likes it. He tells us to.”
Doc sat back, frowning. “Where are they? Angus and the Changeling?”
“Went to the airfield early this evening. Angus went off to fetch Eamon back first. Eamon’s supposed to be here when Angus and Darig aren’t. Angus came back full of spite about you—” he nodded to Doc “—don’t know why, and then he and Darig left. With the old sodder.”
“Who is that?”
“Name is Blackletter.”
Harris saw Doc and Jean-Pierre stiffen. His own back was suddenly tense.
Doc drew a long, slow breath. “Tell me about Blackletter.”
Alpson twisted his mouth, an expression of distaste. “Came a few days ago with three big, stupid-looking men, and a bigger, stupider-looking thing. Took charge; Angus and Darig both call him sir. They talked and talked, like getting reacquainted.” He gave Doc an evaluative look. “I heard some of what they were talking about.”
Doc waited.
Alpson shrugged. “Blackletter asked about the list, whatever that is. Darig said it was all done but the new ones. A man and a woman are the new ones, I know that. I know the list is in the safe.”
“Where is the safe?”
Alpson tapped his left foot. “Just here, beneath my foot.”
Doc turned to Jean-Pierre. “Call Eight-Finger Tom. I’m not going to put anyone less on a deviser’s safe. Offer him whatever it takes to get out here right now.”
Jean-Pierre rose and left.
Doc turned back to Alpson. “What else did they talk about?”
“Blackletter said his list was done. Taunted Angus with it. Good-spirited, like. ‘I’m an old, old man and I finished my list first.’ This afternoon they loaded up equipment and took it out to the airfield.”
“What sort of equipment?”
“Don’t know. Lots of it, though, all in big crates. Took eight slabside trucks to carry it. Loaded it onto two big airwings.”
“This afternoon.”
“Yes.”
“Where were they going?”
The gangster shrugged. “Cretanis, somewhere. Some village. Adnum.”
“Adennum?”
“That’s it.”
“What sort of airwings?”
“Big new Weissefrau Valks.”
Doc sat back, looking distracted; his lips moved, but he didn’t speak.
Harris said, “You mentioned big, dumb guys with him. Tell me about them.”
“Stupid sodders. You can hardly understand their talk. They complain about everything. The cold. The heat. Us. One of them, name of Phipps, said something twisted his favorite firepiece all out of shape. Carried around a big lump of iron he tried to tell me used to be a gun. Stupid bugger.”
“Phipps. Big guy, lots of muscle?”
“Huge, even more than you. Had a busted wing, but Blackletter sent him off to a doctor and he got that fixed right away. They were all big.”
Doc said, “We’ll talk again later. For now, show Lieutenant Athelstane their rooms. Angus’, Darig’s, Moon’s, and Blackletter’s.”
The burly Novimagos guardsman seized Alpson by an ear and yanked him up from the chair. Alpson grunted but didn’t complain and was led out.
Doc turned to Noriko. “We might be able to catch up to him in the Frog Prince.”
She shook her head. “It’s not much faster than Valkyries, Doc. Oh—you mean a straight flight.”
He nodded.
Alastair smacked himself in the forehead. “Not again.”
Noriko rose. “I’ll have it ready by the time the rest of you get there.” She limped out.
“Alastair?” Doc said. “Tell me what you make of this.”
He knelt beside an upright cabinet in the plushly furnished room Alpson had identified as Darig MacDuncan’s. The floor was covered with a colorful rug bearing an intricate geometric design; a four-poster bed surrounded by filmy curtains dominated the room.
Alastair and Harris moved over to look. Harris could hear Jean-Pierre, Gaby, and Alastair ransacking the room next door, the one Angus Powrie had lived in.
Doc knelt over a wooden strongbox. The lock had been forced and the lid was up. Harris could see a crumpled mass of gray cloth inside the box; there seemed to be wooden cubes beneath it. Doc held a curious object: a small, flexible brown disk with a loop attached to one side and an extrusion the size and shape of one finger-digit protruding from the other side. It seemed to be made of a translucent material and bent freely in Doc’s fingers.
The context was wrong, and it took Harris a moment to realize that he was looking at something familiar. “Hey, that’s a pacifier.”
The other two looked at him, curious. “It’s scarcely heavy enough to hurt a man when you hit him with it,” Doc said.
“Huh?”
Doc mimed an overhand blow with a club. “A pacifier. A rubber or leather envelope filled with lead shot. Hoodlums use them to beat men unconscious.”
“No, no, no. A pacifier is a nipple for babies. Pop it in their mouth and they suck on it. It’s made of plastic.” He took it from Doc, turned it over to look for a maker’s mark. On one side, he found the almost invisible emboss reading “Made in Japan” and showed it to Doc. “Japan is the Wo of my world.”
Harris stooped and rooted around in the box. The gray mass was a downy blanket with a maker’s tag still attached to one seam. The cubes beneath it were alphabet blocks identical to ones Harris had had as a child. There was also a plastic rattle.
“Doc, this is all baby stuff from the grim world.” Harris glanced at the two of them and found that each had one eye closed; Doc was looking at the objects with his left eye, Alastair with his right.
They looked at each other and opened their eyes. Alastair said, “It all has the aura of the man who lived in this room, but very, very strong. They’re his baby goods, I’m sure.”
Doc sat back, frowning. “Harris, you said the Changeling was young. How young?”
“Hard to say, especially here on the fair world. Not a teenager. Twenty, maybe twenty-five.” He tried to remember the man’s voice, tried to compare his face to what he’d since learned about the way the fair folk aged. “Closer to twenty.”