Book 03 - Cold Copper Tears by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

services.
    Karentine law lets anyone coin money. Every other kingdom makes
minting a state monopoly because seigniorage—the difference
between the intrinsic metal value of a coin and its monetary
value—is a profit that accrues to the state. The Karentine
Crown, though, gets its cuts. It requires private minters to buy
their planchets, or blanks, from the Royal Mint, costs payable in
fine metal of a weight equal to that of the alloy planchets.
There’s more state profit in not having to make dies and pay
workmen to do the striking.
    The system works most of the time and when it doesn’t,
people get roasted alive, even if they’re Princes of the
Church or officials of the Mint who are cousins of the King. The
foundation of Karentine prosperity is the reliability of
Karenta’s coinage. Karenta is corrupt to the bone but will
permit no tampering with the instrument of corruption.
    I gave the gold piece the most attention. I’d never seen
private gold. It was too expensive just to puff an organizational
ego.
    I picked up the top piece of card stock and read the terse note,
“See the man,” followed by a fish symbol, a bear
symbol, and a street name that constituted an address. Few people
can read so they figure out where they are by reference to commonly
understood symbols.
    Crask wanted me to see somebody. This provocative little package
was supposed to provide useful hints.
    If Crask was dishing out hints, that meant Chodo Contague was
serving up suggestions. Crask didn’t take a deep breath
without Chodo telling him. I decided to check it out. There was no
point getting Chodo miffed.
    The address would be way up north. Of course. I needed a long
hike.
    I didn’t have anything going until Jill arrived. And
I’d been telling myself I needed exercise.
    North End, eh?
    I went upstairs and rummaged through my tool locker, selected
brass knucks, a couple of knives, and my favorite eighteen-inch,
lead-weighted head-knocker. I tucked everything out of sight, then
went down and told Dean I’d be out for a few hours.
     
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12
    Most of us are in worse physical shape than we like to think,
let alone admit. I’m used to that being more the other
guy’s problem than mine. But by the time I covered the six
miles to the North End, I felt it in my calves and the fronts of my
thighs. This was the body that had carried me through weeks of
full-pack marches when I was a Marine?
    It wasn’t. This body was older and it had been beaten up
and banged around more than its share since.
    The neighborhood was elfin and elfin-breed, which means it was
tidy and orderly in an obsessive fashion. This was a neighborhood
where elfish wives whitened stonework with acids and reddened
brickwork with dyes once a week. When it rained the gutters ran
with color. Here the men tended trees as though they were minor
deities and trimmed their tiny patches of lawn with scissors, one
blade of grass at a time. You had to wonder if their private lives
were as ordered and passionless and sterile.
    How had this environment, with its rigid rectitude, produced
Snowball and the Vampires?
    I turned into Black Cross Lane, a narrow two-blocker in the
shadow of Reservoir Hill. I looked for the fish and bear and stray
Vampires.
    It was quiet. Way too quiet. Elfish women should have been out
sweeping the streets or walks or doing something to stave off the
entropy devouring the rest of the city. Worse, the silence smelled
like an old one, in place because something unimaginably awful had
happened and the street remained paralyzed by shock. My advent had
not caused it. Even in this neighborhood there would have been
folks getting out of the way if I was headed into an ambush.
    I have such comforting thoughts.
    I found the place, a four-story gray tenement in fine repair.
The front door stood open. I went up the stoop. The silence within
was deeper than that which haunted the street.
    This was the heart of it, the headwater from which the treacle
of dread