For Love of Mother-Not - Alan Dean Foster [110]
Or had one of the Meliorares—perhaps the one who had fled from Pip’s cage—set off some kind of suicide device to keep his colleagues from the disgrace of an official trial? He felt much better as he considered both reasonable explanations. They fit what had happened, were very plausible.
The only thing they failed to explain was how he had landed two blocks away, apparently unhurt except for a raging headache.
Well, he had been moving toward the door, and explosions could do funny things. The streets of the industrial district were notorious for their potholes, which were usually full of rain water. And he was soaked. Could the force of the explosion have thrown him into one deep enough to cushion his fall and cause him to skip out again like a stone on a pond? Obviously, that was what had happened. There was no other possible explanation.
His head hurt.
Local gendarmes were finally beginning to show up. At their arrival Flinx instinctively turned away, leaving the crowd behind and cradling Pip beneath his slickertic. He was glad that he hadn’t been forced to use his own knife, felt lucky to be alive. Maybe now, at last, external forces would leave him and Mother Mastiff and Pip in peace.
He thought back a last time to that final instant in the warehouse. The rage and desperation had built up in him until he had been unable to stand it any longer and had charged blindly at the Peaceforcer about to kill Pip. He hoped he would never be that angry again in his life.
The crowd ignored the boy as he fled the scene; he vanished into the comforting shadows and narrow alleys that filtered back toward the central city. There was nothing remarkable about him and no reason for the gendarmes to stop and question him. The old man and the executive who had found him lying in the street had already forgotten him, engrossed in the unusual sight of a major fire in perpetually damp Drallar.
Flinx made his way back toward the more animated sections of the city, toward the arguing and shouting and smells and sights of the marketplace and Mother Mastiff’s warm, familiar little shop. He was sorry. Sorry for all the trouble he seemed to have caused. Sorry for the funny old Meliorares who were no more. Sorry for the overzealous Peaceforcers.
Mother Mastiff wouldn’t be sorry, he knew. She could be as vindictive as an AAnn, especially if anything close to her had been threatened.
For himself, however, he regretted the deaths of so many. All for nothing, all because of some erratic, harmless, usually useless emotion-reading ability he possessed. Their own fault, though. Everything that happened was their own fault, Meliorares and Peaceforcers alike. He tried to warn them. Never try to come between a boy and his snake.
The damp trek homeward exhausted his remaining strength. Never before had the city seemed so immense, its byways and side streets so convoluted and tortuous. He was completely worn out.
Mother Mastiff was manning the shop, waiting for him as anxiously as she awaited customers. Her thin, aged arm was strong as she slipped it around his back and helped him the last agonizing steps into the store.
“I’ve been worried like to death over ye, boy! Damn ye for causing a poor old woman such distress.” Her fingers touched his bruised cheeks, his forehead, as her eyes searched for serious damage. “And you’re all cut up and bleeding. What’s to become of ye, Flinx? Ye have got to learn to stay out of trouble.”
He summoned up a grin, glad to be home. “It seems to come looking for me, Mother.”
“Hmpnh! Excuses. The boy’s wit is chock full of excuses. What happened to ye?”
He tried to marshal his thoughts as he slid Pip out from beneath the slickertic. Mother Mastiff backed away. The minidrag