Free Gilded Latten Bones by Glen Cook

the task at hand. I’m not the woman you remember.” She turned her cool, emerald eyes my way. I was afraid I was going to drown there.
    “I’m sorry. I’m probably not the man you think you remember, either.” I watched some of John Stretch’s ratman associates emerge from shadows as Singe moved out with a train of thugs behind. Those hailed from several sides of the law. They stayed back so as not to distract her.
    I asked, “You know why this mess is causing so much excitement?”
    The Windwalker met my gaze. Her eyes were a striking blue. The shy girl I remembered emerged. “I can comment only from a position of vast ignorance. Prince Rupert is concerned about a possible Hill connection.”
    I met the Crown Prince once. He’d asked me to be his personal agent. He was as determined as Deal Relway to afflict TunFaire with great gobs of law and order. Someone who failed to acknowledge that rules existed would be a definite black beast to him.
    “What I wanted to know was, what are you doing here in this room, with us?”
    “I had a notion that, with the healer’s assistance, I might learn something useful. I was wrong. Then I was so startled by seeing you... I should get back to work. I need to be with those people out there.”
    Tight as it was, she got past me and Belinda without getting intimate. She left me totally rattled. Those eyes... I had forgotten those eyes.
     
     

22
    Belinda gave the Windwalker a short lead. “There something between you two? I thought I knew all the bimbos that came after me.”
    “Only in her head. Maybe. She took a weak run at me once upon a time. It didn’t go anywhere. Though... She’s a multiple personality type.”
    “She’d have to be to come down off the Hill to chase you.”
    Belinda was kidding but was so tired and worried she made it sound serious.
    I kept my mouth shut. Belinda wasn’t really interested. She held Morley’s hand and asked, “Where the hell were you for those ten days?”
    I got confused. “Ten days? There some things you haven’t shared with me? The backstory changes as we move along?”
    “What are you yammering about?”
    So I thought back. And decided I was a dumbass. All she had said was that he had been laid up here three days before she brought me in. “I don’t know. I’m having trouble getting my mind into fighting trim. You did wait three days before you came to me?”
    “I was rattled. You, of all people, understand that we do stupid things when we aren’t thinking straight.”
    “He could have died.”
    “But he didn’t. And I did get around to you and the Children of the Light.”
    “Sorry for barking.”
    “I had it coming.” Belinda looked at Morley with the same cow eyes I have seen on a thousand other women. I took a short ramble through the realm of intuition.
    “Belinda?”
    “Uhm?”
    “Were there any weird events around here before I showed up?”
    Sometimes Miss Contague is a mind reader. “You suggesting that they suspected he was still alive but didn’t know where to look? So they watched you. They raided your place to get you moving... No. That doesn’t hang together.”
    “They watched you till you contacted me. Then they watched me. That’s how I would’ve done it. How come they’re so desperate? Where did it happen? What did the people who found him say?”
    “I don’t know where, yet. I’m supposed to go look at a place. They found him dying. That’s about it. It was obvious he wouldn’t need his stuff anymore so they started turning out his pockets.”
    “And found something to connect him to you. So they did the right thing.”
    “They did what they thought might put money in their pockets.”
    “Did they bet wrong?”
    “No. That’s just good public relations. You feed the beast sometimes.”
    “Did you get his stuff back?”
    “I did. I thought he might have been hit because of something he was carrying. He had nothing on him. But he might have been cleaned out where he was