by Glen Cook
When he returned, he stood beside me instead of facing me. "Pretty little gal."
"She was. We had a young one coming, too."
"Looked like. Wadlow! Come here."
One of the older farmers came to us. He planted his scythe and leaned. He looked even more laconic than the first one.
"You sold that swayback mare to that smart-ass city boy what day?"
The second farmer considered the sky as though he might find the answer written there. "Five days ago today. About noon." He eyed me like he was suspicious I might want the money back.
I knew what I wanted to know but had to play the game out. "He say where he was headed?"
Wadlow looked to my companion, who told him, "You tell him what he wants to know."
"Said he was going into the city. Said his horse got stole. Didn't say much of nothing else."
"Hope you took him good. Was he wearing shoes?" It was an off-the-wall question but about the only thing left I had to ask. Except, "Was he alone?"
Wadlow said, "Didn't have no shoes. Boots. Pretty rich-boy boots. Wouldn't last a week out here. He was by his lonesome."
"That's that, then," I said. The older farmer asked, "That tell you what you need?"
"I reckon I know where to look now." And that was true. "Much obliged." I checked the sky. "Thank you, then." I turned to go.
"Luck to you. She was a pretty little thing."
My shoulders tightened and I shuddered in a sudden wash of emotion. I raised a hand and marched on. I had a man's work to do. Those farmers understood better than anybody I knew, except maybe Saucerhead Tharpe. By the time I settled on the buggy seat, the skirmishers were on the move again and the women and children were back to work. Maybe they would find the time to talk about me over supper.
______ XXI ______
It was late when I entered the city but a sliver of light still remained. I had a brainstorm. It was a long shot but it might stir something. I had Amiranda's body propped up beside me. The witch's spells were holding their own and the light helped with the illusion. Maybe somebody who knew she could not be alive would see her and think she was. To that end I made a few cautious forays into the outskirts of Ogre Town, then went up and circled Lettie Faren's place because a lot of the Bruno types from the Hill came there to waste their wages. The wages of sin is that you get cheated out of them. Then I headed home, going around to the back so no one would see me take the body inside. Dean was there despite the hour. He helped with the door and gawked. "What's the matter with her, Mr. Garrett?"
I wasn't in one of my better humors. "She's dead. That's what's the matter with her. Murdered."
He stammered, apologized, stammered some more, so I apologized back and added, "I don't know why. Maybe because she was pregnant. Maybe because she knew too much. Let's take her in to his nibs. He might be able to sort it out."
The Dead Man isn't always as hard and insensitive as he pretends. He read my mood and saved the usual act. That is the one who spent the night. It was the first he admitted knowing about that.
"The same. Let me tell it while I'm in the mood."
He let me run through it up to the moment I carried her in there. Dean ran me mug after mug and hovered solicitously in between. I knew I was doing a good job reporting and had done a good one poking around because he didn't interrupt once and his only questions afterward were about the mammoth. Purely personal curiosity.
Let me mull it, Garrett. You go get drunk. Watch out for him, Dean.
"Watch out for me? Why?"
You are working yourself up toward a quixotic gesture. You are Unreasonable and irrational when you fall into such moods. I caution you to restraint. The information you have gathered is mainly circumstantial and there is not enough to point an accusing finger accurately. Tomorrow I will suggest some courses that may, possibly, produce evidence more concrete.
"More concrete? It's plenty hard enough for me."
You expect to tackle the favorite and only son of the Stormwarden Raver Styx on the basis of a pair of shoes and a horse? When you know there is a high probability that she would shield him even if he were caught cutting the hearts out of babies in the public streets? Further, you may have chosen the wrong villain to be the target of your wrath.
"Who else?"
That is what you will have to discover. It is true, I believe, that there is a reasonable probability that the young daPena and the dead woman were involved in a contrived kidnapping. But that is not a certainty. One simple fact could explain away all the evidence you have adduced as indicting the younger Karl.
"Here you go playing games with my mind again. How are you going to explain everything away?"
Two hundred thousand marks gold. A payoff of that magnitude could waken charity in the heart of a beast as foul as an ogre, perhaps. Perhaps they saw no need to plunder their hostage of pocket money. Damn him. He could be right. The problem with this thing was that there were too many answers instead of not enough. "I don't believe it," I insisted.
Take this and reflect upon it in your cups, then. What became of the gold?
"Huh?"
Insofar as you know, the gold was turned over. Correct? By the woman Amber's direct statement, and by implication from others, all the young people wanted out of the Stormwarden's household. But the younger daPena returned. Would he have done so if it had been he who had received the gold? Or would he have run? You may have to attack it through the money after all. Or, possibly, through the entertaining girl Donni Pell, who looks like the candidate for the connection with the ogre community.
This time I said it aloud. "Damn you."
He let me have a dose of the mental noise that passes as his chuckle. Come back in the morning, Garrett. I will suggest an approach.
I started to go, but there was the thing that used to be Amiranda staring at me with empty eyes. "What about this?"
Leave it. We will commune.
"What's this? Are you a necromancer as well as a mental prodigy? Have you been hiding some of your lights under a bushel?"
No. I expressed myself figuratively only. Co away, Garrett. Even my boundless tolerance has its limits, and you are pressing them. I went off and got myself rather sloppily wrapped around a few gallons of beer. Faithful to his orders, old Dean hung around and shoveled the pieces into my bed when it was time. Damn the Dead Man, anyhow. Why did he have to complicate things?
______ XXII ______
Old Dean knew how to get me going on the morning after. He bullied me into eating a good breakfast. When he thought I was slackening, he started banging pots and pans until I yielded to the lesser evil and resumed eating. A good big breakfast with plenty of apple juice and sweets really knocks the edge off my hangover, but food always looks and smells so ghastly I just can't believe it will do any good. Once I'd stoked up to Dean's satisfaction, he presented me with a huge steaming mug of a smoky-flavored herb tea that had come to us courtesy of Morley Dotes sometime back. It had a mildly analgesic nature. "His nibs is ready anytime you are, Mr. Garrett. You may take the mug along with you."
He was going to trust me carrying something out of the kitchen myself? I gave him a look that he interpreted correctly. He grumbled, "That room was creepy enough with one corpse in it. He can clean up after himself if he's going to keep the other one in there with him."
I rose. From the kitchen doorway I said, "Maybe they'll get married." Feeble, but it wasn't my best time of day. Dean gave me a black look and reached for the biggest pot he could find.
The Dead Man was trying to sleep when I stepped into his room. He was long overdue for one of his three-week naps, but now wasn't the time. "Wake it up, Old Bones. You're supposed to have some suggestions for me this morning."
He had several, but none of the first few was fit to record. I observed, "I take it you're sure enough of your Glory Mooncalled theory that you can indulge in a little smug snoozing."
The latest from the Cantard contains nothing contradictory.
&
nbsp; "You going to break down and tell me?"
Not yet.
"What about the suggested approach you promised me last night?"
I would have thought that you would have seen the best chance already. You had the night to reflect on next moves.
"I took the night off. Give."
You are allowing yourself to become dependent upon my genius. You should be exercising your own, Garrett.
"We human types are bone lazy. Come on. Pay the rent."
Get the younger Karl. Bring him to me. He appears to be the weakest link in the chain of circumstance. If there is a tumor of guilt in him, I will open him up and expose it. One glimpse of that poor child there should be shock enough to leave him pliable.
"That's all I have to do, eh? Just go drag him out of that fort he calls home and bully him into coming here where you can work him over."
I cannot do your legwork for you, Garrett.
"Bah!" He was getting a sarky tone on him, Old Bones was. Maybe he'd stub a toe on his Glory Mooncalled theory and get dragged down from the heights of conceit. Oh, how he loves to strut.
There was a foreign object just inside the front door. "Dean!"
He came at a run. "Yes, Mr. Garrett?"
"What the hell is this?"
Actually, I knew what this was. It was my old pal Bruno frozen in midstride two steps inside the front door and leaning against the wall. His expression was one of terror and one hand grasped the air before him. Dean had used that to hang up the sweater and knit cap he wears when he comes in early mornings. That showed me a side of him I hadn't suspected.
"He came to the door while you were out in the country. When I answered he just busted in past me. His nibs must have heard the uproar."
Better than a watchdog. "And nobody bothered to tell me."
"You had things on your mind."
"How'd he get against the wall?"
"I pushed him out of the way. I have to get in and out to do the marketing."
I stepped over in front of Bruno. "What am I going to do with you? You just keep coming back. Maybe drop you in the river to see how fast you swim? I'll have to think about it, because you're getting to be a nuisance." I turned to Dean. "Maybe we ought to get a chain so things like this don't happen."
Dean admitted, "His nibs could have been asleep."
The problem of Bruno's ego slipped my mind as I trudged up the Hill. I had a bigger problem. How the devil could I get to Junior, let alone pry him out? Considering the attitudes of some up there, I might not get close to the Stormwarden's place. The hired guards might be waiting for me.
They weren't. Not obviously. I tramped around the daPena place three times, hoping maybe Amber would spot me before Eenie, Meenie, Meinie and Moe started closing in and I had to show the Hill the flash of departing heels. It didn't work. I had to go. I decided to take a long walk. Sometimes getting the blood moving vanquishes the gloomier humors and the brain will come up with a thought.
The best I could manage in three hours of marching was the notion of sending Junior a letter saying I knew where the gold was and if he would come down to my place we could talk it over. The trouble with that was it might take a lot of time I didn't have. He might dither a couple of days. Or he might not be able to slip his leash. Or the letter might not get to him at all, with highly unpredictable results. And Amiranda's body wasn't going to keep forever. For want of something more constructive to do, I went around to Saucerhead's place to see how he was mending. A girlfriend I didn't know said he was keeping just fine and I should get the hell away before I got my eyes clawed out. She was no bigger than a minute but she had her back up and looked like she would give it a damned good shot.
So much for Saucerhead. Maybe something had fallen into Morley's lap. Besides somebody's wife or an eggplant steak dinner. Morley wasn't anxious to accept visitors that early in the day but he was awake so I was allowed to go upstairs. He greeted me with a scowl and no banter.
I said, "You look like a guy who isn't getting enough fiber in his diet. What's the matter? Was there a crop failure in the okra forests?"
He grumbled something that sounded like, "Goddim fraggle jigginitz."
"Would you want your virgin daughters to hear language like that?"
"Snacken schtereograk!"
Aha! He was cussing, all right, but in one of the Low Elvish dialects. I've learned that when he goes to grumbling in Elvish he's usually having money troubles. "Been playing the water spiders again, have we?"
"Garrett, are you a curse upon my house?" He actually used a dwarfish idiom equally capable of being translated as "mother-in-law." But I'm such a nice fellow nobody would ever accuse me of mother-in-lawing. "You're the reverse blackbird, you know that? The backward harbinger. Every time I have some bad luck, I have some more because you turn up right afterward. I can count on it."
"You don't want me hanging around, stop betting on the bugs. There's a simple cause-and-effect relationship there—very much like the one between betting on the bugs and losing your boots."
He repeated his curse-upon-the-house remark. "What do you want, Garrett?"
"I want to know if you've heard any news I might find useful."
"No. Ogre Town is as quiet as a crypt. Those guys came from somewhere else. And they took the gold with them when they went back. There hasn't been a whiff of gold around town. If there was a hint of a pile that size, you know the hard boys would be as busy as maggots. Saucerhead is doing all right."
"I know. I found out the hard way. He's got some little she-devil standing gate guard. I thought I was going to get gutted before I got out of there. Who the hell is she?"
He gave me the first flash of teeth of the visit. "His sister, maybe?"
"Horse pucky. Nobody's sister carries on like that."
He grinned. "Actually, I did hear one thing you might want to know, but I don't see how it would be much use."
"Well?"
"A drunken sailor off a night boat staggered in here right before we closed this morning. The gods know why he came here."
"I was just thinking that myself. Only they know why anybody does." "Night boat" is a euphemism for smuggler. Smugglers account for a third of TunFaire's river trade.
"You want to hear this or do you want to wisecrack your way to ignorance?"
"Speak to me, Oracle of the Lettuce."
"He mentioned that Raver Styx's ship entered the harbor at Leifmold the afternoon they left for TunFaire. She's on her way home, Garrett. She'll be here in a few days. If that will make any difference in the way you do what you think you have to do."
"It might. I figure Junior deserves special attention because of Saucerhead and Amiranda. Having Mom around might present difficulties."
"That's the whole barrel, then. Go away so I can feel sorry for myself."
"Right. Next time you got to bet on the bugs, let me know so I can get down the other way and clean up."
"There won't be a next time, Garrett."
"Good for you, Morley." I left the room thinking I had heard it before. He might hang in there awhile, but sooner or later he'd hear about a sure thing and the fever would get him. I told the barman downstairs, "Send him a couple of turnip tenderloins smothered in onions and a double shot of your high-proof celery juice, straight up. On me."
He didn't crack a smile. I headed home, my head filled with visions of a steak so rare Morley would die to look at it.
______ XXIII ______
Dean had the place sealed up tight. Good for him. Sometimes he forgets. I pounded away. He came and peeked through the peephole. He made a production out of checking to see if I was there under duress. Then he started clinking and clunking as he unlatched latches. He flung the door open.
"Am I glad you're finally here, Mr. Garrett." He did sound glad. He retreated. I went in after him, started to pull the door shut.
"What the hell? What's this?"
We had gained another hall ornament. This one went by the name Courter Sl
auce when it wasn't in the home-furnishings racket.
"Dean!"
But he was headed for the kitchen at a high-speed shuffle and dared not battle the momentum he had developed. He tossed an answer over his shoulder but it didn't have enough oomph behind it. It fell on the floor before it got to me. I paused beside Slauce. "Finances take a turn for the worse? You'll never make ends meet housebreaking."
Funny. He didn't answer. He could hear well enough, though. And I could almost hear the nasty thoughts slithering round inside his head. I told him, "You'll make great company for Bruno. He's been dying for a shoulder to cry on."
I stepped past Bruno. Such a quandary. Drop in on the Dead Man and let him know I hadn't yet found a way to lure Junior into his lair? Or track Dean down and find out why we had another statue in the hall?
Dean won the toss. He was closer to the beer. As I pushed through the door I heard Dean saying, "There. There, now. It'll be all right. Mr. Garrett is here now. He'll take care of everything."
Sure he would. He stepped on in to get a better idea of where to start. Dean had his arms around an Amber who was shaking and looked like eighteen going on a terrified ten instead of thirty. Dean was patting her back and trying to still her tears. The same Dean who had stamped her with his scarlet seal of disapproval. Something had shaken her badly. And the soft heart inside the old crab's shell had melted to her terror.
"Well?" I asked, sidling to the cold well. "Somebody want to give me an idea what's going on?"
Amber let out a growl, tore herself away from Dean, charged into me, opening the floodgates as she came. So much for having a beer. Dean had the grace to look embarrassed as he drifted to the cold well. I let Amber get the tears out. There is no point interrupting a woman when she is crying. If you don't get it over in one big chunk, you have to take it in a lot of little ones that come at unexpected and inopportune times. Meantime, Dean got me a mug. When Amber was down to the sniffs and quivers, I set her in a chair and told Dean to break out the brandy we keep for special occasions. I settled opposite her, in hand-touching range, and went to work on my mug. The first half went down quick and easy.