Bitter Gold Hearts

______ XXI ______

It was late when I entered the city but a sliver of light still remained. I had a brainstorm. It was a long shot but it might stir something. I had Amiranda's body propped up beside me. The witch's spells were holding their own and the light helped with the illusion. Maybe somebody who knew she could not be alive would see her and think she was. To that end I made a few cautious forays into the outskirts of Ogre Town, then went up and circled Lettie Faren's place because a lot of the Bruno types from the Hill came there to waste their wages. The wages of sin is that you get cheated out of them. Then I headed home, going around to the back so no one would see me take the body inside. Dean was there despite the hour. He helped with the door and gawked. "What's the matter with her, Mr. Garrett?"

I wasn't in one of my better humors. "She's dead. That's what's the matter with her. Murdered."

He stammered, apologized, stammered some more, so I apologized back and added, "I don't know why. Maybe because she was pregnant. Maybe because she knew too much. Let's take her in to his nibs. He might be able to sort it out."

The Dead Man isn't always as hard and insensitive as he pretends. He read my mood and saved the usual act. That is the one who spent the night. It was the first he admitted knowing about that.

"The same. Let me tell it while I'm in the mood."

He let me run through it up to the moment I carried her in there. Dean ran me mug after mug and hovered solicitously in between. I knew I was doing a good job reporting and had done a good one poking around because he didn't interrupt once and his only questions afterward were about the mammoth. Purely personal curiosity.

Let me mull it, Garrett. You go get drunk. Watch out for him, Dean.

"Watch out for me? Why?"

You are working yourself up toward a quixotic gesture. You are Unreasonable and irrational when you fall into such moods. I caution you to restraint. The information you have gathered is mainly circumstantial and there is not enough to point an accusing finger accurately. Tomorrow I will suggest some courses that may, possibly, produce evidence more concrete.

"More concrete? It's plenty hard enough for me."

You expect to tackle the favorite and only son of the Stormwarden Raver Styx on the basis of a pair of shoes and a horse? When you know there is a high probability that she would shield him even if he were caught cutting the hearts out of babies in the public streets? Further, you may have chosen the wrong villain to be the target of your wrath.

"Who else?"

That is what you will have to discover. It is true, I believe, that there is a reasonable probability that the young daPena and the dead woman were involved in a contrived kidnapping. But that is not a certainty. One simple fact could explain away all the evidence you have adduced as indicting the younger Karl.

"Here you go playing games with my mind again. How are you going to explain everything away?"

Two hundred thousand marks gold. A payoff of that magnitude could waken charity in the heart of a beast as foul as an ogre, perhaps. Perhaps they saw no need to plunder their hostage of pocket money. Damn him. He could be right. The problem with this thing was that there were too many answers instead of not enough. "I don't believe it," I insisted.

Take this and reflect upon it in your cups, then. What became of the gold?

"Huh?"

Insofar as you know, the gold was turned over. Correct? By the woman Amber's direct statement, and by implication from others, all the young people wanted out of the Stormwarden's household. But the younger daPena returned. Would he have done so if it had been he who had received the gold? Or would he have run? You may have to attack it through the money after all. Or, possibly, through the entertaining girl Donni Pell, who looks like the candidate for the connection with the ogre community.

This time I said it aloud. "Damn you."

He let me have a dose of the mental noise that passes as his chuckle. Come back in the morning, Garrett. I will suggest an approach.

I started to go, but there was the thing that used to be Amiranda staring at me with empty eyes. "What about this?"

Leave it. We will commune.

"What's this? Are you a necromancer as well as a mental prodigy? Have you been hiding some of your lights under a bushel?"

No. I expressed myself figuratively only. Co away, Garrett. Even my boundless tolerance has its limits, and you are pressing them. I went off and got myself rather sloppily wrapped around a few gallons of beer. Faithful to his orders, old Dean hung around and shoveled the pieces into my bed when it was time. Damn the Dead Man, anyhow. Why did he have to complicate things?