80

I shut the door behind Tharpe, locked up, strode to the Dead Man’s door. I leaned inside. He looked the same: big and ugly. “I did all right for a guy whose help is so bone lazy . . . ”

I kept close watch. You were less at risk than you imagine. He puts thoughts directly into your head.

“After you started siccing the bird on me, maybe. By then I’d been through the hairiest part.”

You understand that the Winger creature knew the Jenn woman and Cleaver were one, right from the start?

“Sure. And she knew you were snoring or she’d never have came in here to set her hook. She still has an angle. She thinks. Only Emerald was ahead of everybody, probably from before she ever left home.”

Indeed. The female of your species, if at all presentable, is capable of manipulating the brightest of you.

“If that’s her scheme. The Belindas and Maggies and Emeralds aren’t that common, though. Luckily.”

Far be it from me to note your eagerness to be suborned by such females.

“Yeah. But not far enough.” In the other room the Goddamn Parrot started preaching what the Dead Man was thinking with one of his other minds. “Got to do something about that thing.”

Somebody knocked. Once more you have the opportunity to keep your word.

Becky Frierka. And her mother, of course.

“Why should I be the unique truth-telling character in this part of town?”

As I went to the door the Dead Man sent, The quest for Eagle’s hoard is vain. The burial cairn lay on a slope overlooking Pjesemberdal fjord. That entire mountainside collapsed into the fjord during an earthquake three centuries before my mishap.

“Really?” If anyone around today would know, he would. “Might have been handy to know that before. When you were watching so close.”

Any adventurer who deciphers the sagas discovers the truth eventually. But so much blood gets spilled that the guilty dare not give warning to the world. He loaded that thought up with a cargo of amusement at human antics. But something unrelated leaked through, too. He was worried about the political climate. He had a stake in a tolerant TunFaire.

Details plucked from my mind didn’t reassure him.

I pasted on my boyish grin and got to work. It took an effort to keep smiling. Becky’s mother doesn’t have a husband. She’s actively screening candidates.

Couldn’t have been a better time for my parrot to go berserk, for my houseman to show his mean streak, for my partner to be himself. Naturally, nobody cooperated.

I am nothing if not valiant in my efforts to do the right thing. Becky got her date, exactly according to terms.