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

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.
     
     

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 flowed.
    What was I supposed to do?
    Do