Free Book 02 - Bitter Gold Hearts by Glen Cook

long, dark, narrow
valley between your mother and the kidnappers before we get that
gold socked away.”
    She looked at me with big eyes while that sank in. Then she
turned on the smile. “Keep that golden carrot dangling out
front and this mule won’t even see the brooding
hills.”
    So. A little slow, maybe, but gutsy. Old Dean was watching from
down the hall, exercising his disapproving scowl. I patted Amber on
the fanny. “That’s the spirit, kid. Remember. I’m
half an hour behind you. Try not to leave me standing in the street
too long.”
    She spun around and laid a kiss on me that must have curled
Dean’s hair and toes. It did mine. She backed off, winked,
and scooted.
----

XIV
    I went back and got a big cold one to fortify myself for the
coming campaign. I had to draw it myself. Dean had been stricken
blind and could hear nothing but ghosts. He was exasperated with
me. I downed the long one, drew another, lowered the keg, then went
to tell the Dead Man the latest. He growled and snarled a little,
just to make me feel at home. I asked if he was ready to reveal
Glory Mooncalled’s secrets. He told me no, and get out, and I
left suspecting cracks had appeared in his hypothesis. A cracked
hypothesis can be lethal to the Loghyr ego.
    After depositing my empty mug in the kitchen, I went upstairs
and rooted through the closet that serves as the household arsenal,
selected a few inconspicuous pieces of steel and a lead-weighted,
leather-wrapped truncheon that had served me well in the past. With
a warning to Dean to lock up after the ghosts left, I hit the
street. It was a nice day if one doesn’t mind an inconsistent
hovering between mist and drizzle. Comes with the time of year. The
grape growers like it except when they don’t. If they had
their way, every Stormwarden in the business would be employed
full-time making fine adjustments in weather so they could maximize
the premium of their vintages.
    I was moist and crabby by the time I reached the Hill and
started looking for a place to lurk. But the neighborhood had been
designed with the inconsiderate notion that lurkers should not be
welcome, so I had to hoof it up and down and around, hanging out in
one small area trying to look like I belonged there. I told myself
I was a pavement inspector and went to work detecting every defect
in the lay of those stones. After fifteen minutes that lasted a day
and a half, I caught Amber’s signal—a candle instead of a
mirror—and started drifting toward the postern. A day later that
opened and Amber peeked out.
    “Not a minute too soon, sweetheart. Here come the
dragoons.”
    The folks on the Hill all tip into a community pot to hire a
band of thugs whose task is to spare the Hill folk the
discomfitures and embarrassments of the banditry we who live closer
to the river have to accept as a fact of life, like dismal
weather.
    Not fooled for a minute by my romance with the cobblestones, a
pair of those luggers were headed my way under full sail. They had
been on the job too long. Their beams were as broad as their
heights. But they meant business and I wasn’t interested in
getting into a head-knocking contest with guys who had merely to
blow a whistle to conjure up more arguments for their side.
    I got through the postern and left them with their meat hooks
clamped on nothing but a peel of Amber’s laughter.
“That’s Meenie and Mo. They’re brothers. Eenie
and Minie must have been circling in on you from the other side. We
used to tease them terribly when we were kids.”
    A couple of remarks occurred to me, but with manly fortitude I
kept them behind my teeth.
    Amber led me through a maze of servants’ passages,
chattering brightly about how she and Karl used the corridors to
elude Willa Dount’s vigilance. Again I restrained myself from
commenting.
    We had to go up a flight and this way and that, part through
passages no longer in use, or at least immune to cleaning. Then
Amber shushed me while she peeked