Cold Copper Tears Read Free Page B

retainer. I wander around the brewery when I have nothing better to do. I make people nervous there. Considering what he’d been losing, I’m cheap insurance. The retainer isn’t much.
    “He tell you to see me?”
    The dink took the bucket back, sipped like an expert. “I’m unfamiliar with many facets of the secular world, Mr. Garrett. Mr. Weider is face-to-face with it every day. He said you were the man I need. Provided, as he put it, I can pry you off your dead ass.”
    That sounded like Weider. “He’s more achievement oriented than I am.” And how. He started out with nothing; now he’s TunFaire’s biggest brewer and has fingers in twenty other pies.
    “So I gather.”
    We passed the bucket back and forth.
    He said, “I looked you over. You seem perfect for my needs. But the factors that make you right make it hard to recruit you. I have no way to appeal to you.”
    It was a mellow evening. I was too lazy to move. I had nothing else on my mind but a couple of oddballs down the way who were dead ringers for a couple of oddballs who were hanging around last time I came out. “You bought the beer, friend. Speak your piece.”
    “I’d expected that courtesy. Trouble is, once I tell you the cat will be out of the bag.”
    “I don’t gossip about business. That’s bad for business.”
    “Mr. Weider did praise your discretion.”
    “He’s got reason.”
    We went back and forth with the beer. The sun ambled on. The little guy held a conference with himself to see if his trouble was really that bad.
    It was worse, probably. Usually they’re going down for the third time when they ask for help — and then they want to sneak up on it like a virgin.
    “My name is Magnus Peridont.”
    I didn’t wilt. I didn’t gasp or faint. He was disappointed. I said, “Magnus? Nobody in real life is named Magnus. That’s a handle they stick on some guy who’s been dead so long everybody’s forgotten what a horse’s ass he was.”
    “You’ve never heard of me?”
    It was one of those names you ought to know. It had turned up on a loo wall somewhere, or something. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”
    “My father thought I was destined for greatness. I’m sure I was a disappointment. I’m also known as Magister Peridont and Peridontu, Altodeoria Prin-ceps.”
    “I hear a distant campanile.” A Magister is that rarest of all fabulous beasts, a sorcerer sanctioned by the Church. The other title was a relic of antiquity. It meant something like he was a Prince of the City of God. There was a bunk in heawn with his name on it, guaranteed. The bosses of the Church had-made him a saint before he croaked.
    A thousand years ago that would have made his a dyed-in-the-wool, hair-shirt-wearing, pillar-sitting holy man. These days it probably meant he scared the crap out of everybody and they wanted to buy him off with baubles.
    I asked, “Would Grand Inquisitor and Malevechea fit in there somewhere?”
    “I have been called those things.”
    “I’m getting a fix on you.” That Peridont was one scary son-of-a-bitch. Luckily, we live in a world where the Church is always one gasp short of being a dead issue. It claims maybe ten percent of Karenta’s human population and none of the nonhuman. It says only humans have souls and other races are just clever animals capable of aping human speech and manners. That makes the Church real popular with the clever animals.
    “You’re dismayed,” he said.
    “Not exactly. Say I have philosophical problems with some of the Church’s tenets.” Elfish civilization antedates ours by millennia. “I didn’t know Mr. Weider was a member.”
    “Not in good standing. Call him lapsed. He was born to the faith. He spoke to me as a favor to his wife. She’s one of our lay sisters.”
    I remembered her, a fat old woman with a mustache, always in black, with a face like she had a mouth full of lemons. “I see.”
    Now that I knew who he was, we were on equal ground. Now he needed leading