Angry Lead Skies by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online Page A

and somebody tried to take it away from him?”
    Playmate nodded.
    “Could it be that Kip’s having problems because somebody wants to steal his ideas?” I’m sure that I’m not the only royal subject bright enough to see the potential of Kip’s inventions.
    Playmate nodded. “That could be going on, too. But there’s definitely something to the trouble with the weird elves. And right now I’m more worried about them. Stay here and keep an eye on Kip while I make us all a pot of tea.”
    Ever civilized, my friend Playmate. In the midst of chaos he’ll take time for amenities, all with the appropriate service.
     
     

9
    Kip tired of filing his metal wheel. He put it aside and started fiddling with something wooden. I watched from the corner of one eye while I thumbed through Playmate’s drawings and sketches. The man really was good. More so than with portraits, he had a talent for translating Kip’s ideas into visual images. There was a lot of written information on some of the sheets, inscribed in a hand that was not Playmate’s.
    “How do you come up with this stuff?” I asked Kip. I didn’t expect an answer. If he heard it at all the question was sure to irritate him. Creative people get it all the time. They get tired of questions that imply that the artist couldn’t possibly produce something out of the whole cloth of the mind. It was a question I wouldn’t have asked a painter or poet.
    Kip surprised me by responding, “I don’t know, Mr. Garrett. They just come to me. Sometimes in my dreams. I’ve always had ideas and a head full of stories. But lately those have been getting better than they ever were before.” He did not look up from the piece of wood he was shaping.
    He had become a different person now that he was settled in the sanctuary of his workshop. He was calm and he was confident.
    I wondered how much puberty had to do with his problems and creativity.
    Tucked into the back of Playmate’s folio, folded so I nearly overlooked them, were four smaller sketches of strange “elves.”
    “Would these be some of the people who’re giving you a hard time?”
    The boy looked up from his work. “Those two are Noodiss and Lastyr. Left and right. They’re the good ones. I don’t know the other two. They may be some of the ones Play ran off.”
    Playmate arrived with the tea. “They are.”
    “I told you your talent would be a wonderful tool in the war against evil. See? We have two villains identified already.”
    “Do we, then?”
    No, we doedn’t, doed we? We had sketches of a couple of likely baddies about whom we knew nothing whatsoever. I wasn’t even sure they were the same kind of elves as the other two. They didn’t look like the same breed in the sketches.
    I changed the subject. “I have an idea, too.”
    Man and boy looked at me skeptically.
    “It can happen!” I insisted. “Look. You see how much work it was making the steering handles for your three-wheel? You could use ox horns instead. You could get them from the slaughterhouses.” Though the two of them began to look aghast I warmed to greater possibilities. “You could get them to save you the whole skull with the horns still attached. You could produce a special death’s-head model three-wheel for customers from the Hill.”
    Playmate shook his head. “Drink your tea, Garrett. And plan to go to bed early tonight. You need the rest.” I offered him a hard glower.
    Guess I need to practice up. He wasn’t impressed. He just smiled and told me, “You’re starting to hallucinate.”
    “And I should leave that to the experts. All right. Why don’t I do some work? What can you tell me about these maybe elves that you haven’t told me already?”
    “They eat a lot of ugly soup,” Playmate told me. “My drawings don’t do them justice.”
    None of them appeared particularly repulsive to me. And I said so. Those homely boys didn’t know it but I was looking out for them.
    “Call it an inner glow kind of