Book 07 - Deadly Quicksilver Lies by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online

how
she was never coming back in ten thousand years?”
    “No.” Maggie chuckled. “I had a few of those
with
my
mother. Probably why she didn’t squawk when
my father sold me. No. Not Emerald. This kid is different, Garrett.
She never cared about anything enough to fight. Really, honestly,
swear to whatever god, I wasn’t a pushy mother. She was happy
just to go along. Far as she was concerned, life is a river and she
was driftwood.”
    “I maybe lost something in all the excitement. Or maybe
I’ve started remembering things that never happened. I could
have sworn you were going on about her having fallen in with bad
companions.”
    Maggie chuckled. She snorted. She looked uncomfortable. She did
it all fetchingly. I tried to imagine her as she might have been in
Teodoric’s day. I was awed by the possibilities.
    She stopped wriggling. “I fibbed a little. I heard about
you having a relationship with the Sisters of Doom and figured you
were a sucker for a kid in trouble.” The Sisters of Doom is
an all-girl street gang. The girls were all abused before they fled
to the street.
    “It was a relationship with one Sister. Who left the
street.”
    “I’m sorry. I overstepped.”
    “What?”
    “It’s obvious I just stomped on some tender
feelings.”
    “Oh. Yeah. Maya was a pretty special kid. I messed up a
good thing because I didn’t take her serious enough. I lost a
friend because I didn’t listen.”
    “Sorry. I was just trying to find a sure hook.”
    “Did Emerald see anybody regularly?” Business would
take me away from memories. Maya was not one of my great loves, but
she was pretty special. And both Dean and the Dead Man had approved
of her. There had been no separation, she just didn’t come
around anymore and mutual friends all hinted that she
wouldn’t unless I grew up a little.
    That don’t punch your ego up, considering it traced back
to a girl just eighteen.
    Emerald’s writing desk had numerous cubbies and tiny
drawers. I searched them as we talked. I didn’t find much.
Most spaces were empty.
    “She does have friends but making friends doesn’t
come easy.”
    That wasn’t the story as it was told a few minutes ago. I
suspected Emerald had troubles that had nothing to do with social
status. Chances were she was lost in her mother’s shadow.
“Friends are where I’ll find her trail. I’ll need
names. I’ll need to know where I can find the people who go
with them.”
    She nodded. “Of course.” I slammed a drawer, turned
away from her. I had to keep my mind on business. The woman was a
witch. Then I sneaked a peek. Did I really want to leave all that,
to go hunting somebody who probably didn’t want to be
found?
    Ha! Here was something. A silver pendant. “What’s
this?” Purely rhetorical. I knew what I had. It was an amulet
consisting of a silver pentagram on a dark background with a
goat’s head inside the star. The real question was, what was
it doing where I had found it?
    Maggie took it, studied it while I watched for a reaction. I
didn’t see one. She said, “I wonder where that came
from?”
    “Emerald into the occult?”
    “Not that I know of. But you can’t know everything
about your children.”
    I grunted, resumed my search. Maggie chattered like the fabled
magpie, mostly about her daughter, more in the way of reminiscences
than useful facts. I listened with half an ear.
    I found nothing else in the desk. I moved to the shelves. The
presence of several books brought home how much wealth Maggie stood
to lose. Because a book takes forever to copy, it is about the most
expensive toy you can give a child.
    I grunted as I picked up the third book. It was a small,
leather-bound, time-worn thing with a goat’s head tooled into
its cover. The leather was badly foxed. The pages were barely
readable. It was one old book.
    My first clue was that it was not written in modern
Karentine.
    Those damned things never are, are they? Nobody would take them
seriously if any