Glen Cook - Petty Pewter Gods

Spilled milk, Garrett.

Maggie never came back. She left me with some powerful curiosities, but I never went over to the temple where she set up as boss yahoo of the combined and restructured and now intensely feminist Shayir/Godoroth cult. Whenever I was tempted, I had only to touch my scarred earlobe, my thumping carotid artery, and I had little trouble resisting. If I still felt the tug, somewhere in the back of my mind I heard Nog is inescapable and I recalled who all else might be there waiting for me.

No pack of earth mothers, that bunch.

I was too busy to commit suicide, anyway.

The very next time there was a shakeout in the Dream Quarter, Maggie's gang headed west ten places. They had managed to turn the near destruction of TunFaire into a public relations coup.

The really bad, horrible, awful part of the whole ordeal, more a cause for despair than any interdimensional hole with a starving tentacle factory stuck in it, came when a nasty little neighbor brat pounded on the drunken, leaning remains of my door and hollered, "Mr. Garrett?"

"What?" demanded the drunken, leaning remains of me.

"Mrs. Cardonlos told me bring this back to you." He handed me a bedraggled, frosty, half-drowned parrot. At the exact moment that Morley Dotes chose to arrive, having hustled over to see if I was all right.

I cursed some. I whined some. To no avail. Mrs. Cardonlos tossed me a cheerful wave motivated by 190-proof malice. And the Dead Man sent, I had to prevent his being pulled through, Garrett. He is far too valuable to let go.

"Valuable to who?"

Morley stood there smiling wickedly.

As I carried the bird to his perch I wondered if I burned the house could I get him and the Dead Man both?