Glen Cook - Red Iron Nights

"Way it goes, Garrett. I could've let Relway deal with them, but you'da bitched about that too."

"Huh?"

"Crask coulda hanged hisself while he was inside. Out of remorse, maybe." He grinned. Remorse? That was a good one. ‘"Somebody coulda stuck Sadler tonight. But if that'd happened, you'da pissed and moaned until we was all ready to help you swallow a chicken bone."

He was right. Morley was right. I really did have to hone me up a more practical set of ethics. It's a proved fact, fanatic adherence to ideals can be fatal in the real world. Especially in TunFaire, where ethics and ideals are mystic words in a tongue unknown to ninety-nine percent of the population.

I admitted he was right, possibly. "But pretend I'm your conscience sometimes. Don't get so eager taking back the streets that you forget why we have laws in the first place."

"Thanks, Garrett. Any day now I figure to see you in a long gray robe, howling on the steps of the Chancery."

I had to get away. He might brainwash me. I was that tired. He had me halfway gone already. That was scary, agreeing with the Watch about anything.

Going home wasn't much improvement. I got rid of the worst of my uninvited guests, but then there was still Barking Dog. I wasn't especially kind. "I've been awake more hours than I know how to count. During that time three different people tried to kill me." Maybe I exaggerated. Who knows what might have happened had certain parties had their way? "They tried to kill friends of mine. The state I'm in, I'm not going to listen to much complaining. You got a bitch, bring it around in a few days." I didn't remind him that I wasn't on his payroll and he had no bitch coming.

So much for restraint. My remarks won me all kinds of points with the ladies. Belinda opened her trick bag and discovered she had eleventeen varieties of hell she could give me for mistreating my elders. Candy got thoroughly huffy and completely forgot who'd just saved her delicate posterior. She took Barking Dog home and didn't return.

She is his real daughter , the Dead Man told me.

"I figured that out. Didn't even have to count on my fingers."

It is a long story.

"Then don't waste your time telling it. I'm going to bed." I sped Belinda a meaningful look. It didn't have any meaning for her. She fussed over Dean, who had set up in the small front room again. Things she told him suggested she wouldn't be following through on earlier threats.

Her mother entered a liaison with a man Candy truly believed to be her father till quite recently.

"Must we? Now?" I eyed the front door. The door that wasn't anymore. Could I trust the Dead Man to stay awake while I got some rest?

He indicated he could be trusted. Amidst his tear-jerker story, in which our beautiful young heroine overcame all obstacles to be reunited with her real father.

"Right, Chuckles. We all saw how she was just foaming at the mouth to be reunited."

I figured she'd be sick of him in about two days. In fact, she already knew enough that she hadn't wanted anything direct to do with him till tonight. Maybe never forever after once she got a look at the dump where he lived.

The Dead Man went on but I was stubborn. I shut him out. I shut out all their demands and went up to bed. During the several seconds it took me to fall asleep, I waxed nostalgic about the good old days when I lived alone and sometimes got to do things the way I wanted.

Dean let me in through the new door. His arm wasn't broken after all, and our disaster hit the spot for a busybody like him. He'd had workmen in, and was nagging them green, as soon as the sun rose. When I'd been able to sleep through the end-of-the-world racket no longer, I'd gotten up and gotten out, pursuing the Dead Man's suggestion that I double-check on Block and his boys.

"What they did," I told the Dead Man when I got back, "was stuff them in cells while they were unconscious. Then they bricked up the doors. The cells don't have windows. There's a slot in the door so food can be passed through."

That may be enough. Or a sewage chute...

I jumped in smugly. "All taken care of, Smiley. Taken care of. I noticed the business about the rope belts."

The what?

"Rope belts. All our villains wore them. And then Winchell turned up at Hullar's with his belt partly unbraided. The guy that tore up our place had on what looked like it was what was missing from Winchell's rope. I knew what was happening, then. The rope carries the curse."

You failed to mention that.

I snickered. "So I cheated a little so I wouldn't get all the glory hogged away."

What glory? There will be none for you. The public is going to believe that the triumph over the curse is all Captain Block's fault. He will see to it.

Killjoy. "Block has the ropes locked up in a box stashed inside a sealed coffin in another bricked-up cell."

The Dead Man remained dubious, given the ineptitude of the Watch. I was worried too. I concealed it. "Got some final translations on my research. I was right. The whole thing started over a woman. They even found me a portrait of Drachir... "

Who was a ringer for the old man in the coach, I presume.

"Yeah." You can't hold out on a determined mind reader. "And he wore butterfly earrings."

He had a strong interest in butterflies.

"Apparently."

And a stronger interest in outliving his rival.

He was stealing my thunder. Here I'd come home chock-full of news and he was stealing it out of my head or he'd figured it out already. "Yeah. He'd figured out how to become immortal the hard way. When he set up the curse thing, he put an extra twist on it so the Candide woman, who'd spurned him, would be sure to get got. Then he let himself get killed. Didn't matter to him. He would come back to life through his curse. Except his curse always gets stopped just before it finishes recreating the man who created it."

You have to wonder about people like Drachir, who are willing to sacrifice hundreds on the off chance they might whip death for a while themselves. There are people out there, masquerading as human beings, who never see you and me as having any more value than a beetle. It's a pity they aren't content to devour each other.

I expected either prisoner to kill himself at the curse's behest. The Dead Man disagreed. That would serve no purpose now. Suppose one of them did bite through the veins in his wrists? What then? Not even Block is stupid enough to enter the cell without a first-line wizard backing him up.

"Assuming any ever shows up."

Indeed. They may never. They may never leave the Cantard.

"And meantime we got a corpse rotting. Someday somebody gets sick of the stink, opens the cell... " The Dead Man had stopped listening. Vaguely, he admitted there might be something to my concern. But I'd made the mistake of nudging his thoughts toward the Cantard. Suddenly he was preoccupied by the south.

There'd been a flood of news. I'd been picking it up all morning, but he'd gotten a big dose from Saucerhead already. That was my buddy Tharpe, rush right in with anything newsworthy—if it was going to make Garrett's life a little more miserable. I love the guy, but he doesn't know from consequences. If brains were glazier's putty, he couldn't weatherproof a windowless room.

Word out of the Cantard made it look like we were in for a Karentine triumph. We could look forward to endless parades and countless mind-numbing speeches.

Karentine losses were as heavy as I'd predicted, but the morCartha had rewritten the Cantard equation completely. The Venageti were done for. They'd collapsed. Quarache was their northernmost outpost now. That was so far to the south, even our long-range commandos hadn't reached it till recently.