So what was I going to do now? Go looking for some villains, just on general principles? Sure. Right. The way my luck runs, I'd have a building fall on me before I found any bad boys to astonish and dismay.
I managed to kill time till supper came along. I spent most of it trying to figure out why I was restless and uneasy. Tinnie had been hurt, but she was going to make
it. Saucerhead and I had—sort of—dissuaded her attacker from becoming a repeat offender. Everything had turned out all right. Things were going to be fine.
Sure.
6
I didn't get much sleep that night.
It was a time of weirdness for TunFaire, maybe because of the weather. The whole world had turned cockeyed, not just me with my running and my going to bed early so I could get up before anybody sane was oriented vertically. Mammoths had been seen from the city wall. Saber-tooth tigers were at large within a day's travel. There were rumors of werewolves. There were rumors of thunder-lizards being sighted near KirtchHeis, just sixty miles north of TunFaire, two hundred south of their normal range. To our south, centaurs and unicorns, fleeing ferocious fighting in the Cantard, had penetrated Karentine territory Every night, here in the city, the sky filled with squabbling morCartha, weird creatures who traditionally confined their brawls to rain-forested valleys on the marches of thunder-lizard country.
Where the morCartha disappeared during the day no one knew—nobody gave a big enough care to find out— but all night they zoomed over the rooftops settling old tribal scores or swooped down to mug citizens or to steal anything not nailed down. Most people accepted their presence as proof the thunder-lizards were migrating. In their own country morCartha lived in the treetops and slept during the day. That would make them easy snacks for the taller thunder-lizards Some of these stand more than thirty feet tall.