Free Bitter Gold Hearts by Glen Cook

when I really want something, Garrett.”
    “I’ll bet you can. I hope you’re as stubborn about the gold if we find things getting tight.” I guided her toward the front door.
    “Tight? How could it get dangerous?”
    “Are you kidding? Not to be melodramatic” — like hell! —” but it could get to be a 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