Surrender to the Will of the Night - By Glen Cook Page 0,32

his dress. But Hecht had heard no one but Ghort himself denigrate Pinkus Ghort’s intelligence.

Ghort said, “You musta hauled some major ass, getting down here from Alten Weinberg so fast, Pipe.”

“Promises to keep. What happened here?”

“Firepowder accident. Believe it or not, people survived that. Most of the servants. Gervase Saluda and Paludan Bruglioni, both. Though they’re both bad hurt. Paludan might not make it. Saluda was just leaving when it happened. Lintel came down and crushed his legs. He’ll probably never walk again. The rest of the family are still down there. Along with a fortune in rare wines. I’m told.” Ghort sounded more distressed about the wine than the trapped Bruglioni.

“They had a fine cellar when I worked here. You sure it was an accident?”

“It was pure stupidity. We have a witness who heard an idiot Bruglioni nephew brag that he was going to steal some firepowder and make his own fireworks. He was carrying an open lamp instead of a closed lantern.”

Hecht stared at the rubble. Dust still swirled in the hole. He tried exercising his cynical side. “Who’d profit if it wasn’t an accident?”

“Same folks as will anyway. Anybody in the Five Families who ain’t named Bruglioni. This should about do the family in.”

Kait Rhuk said, “Permission to interject, Captain-General?”

“Go ahead.”

“Colonel. Why would the Bruglioni have had enough firepowder to do this? Not to mention that—I think—legally, firepowder is supposed to be made exclusively for us. The Patriarch’s men.”

“Good point,” Hecht said.

Pinkus Ghort did not quite look Hecht in the eye. “The Collegium say they’re part of the Patriarchal armed forces, Pipe. Looking at it realistically, firepowder manufacturers are producing more than you’re buying. Your conquest of Artecipea took care of the saltpeter shortage. They’re turning a tidy profit on the extra production.” And, perhaps, certain individuals charged with enforcing the rules were getting a share.

Hecht glared toward the Devedian quarter, yet was more irked with himself than those people. This he should have foreseen.

There was nothing more likely to facilitate the redistribution of wealth than a new means of killing people. Though handling and employing firepowder effectively required skill.

Skilled firepowder handler Kait Rhuk asked, “How long before we see firepowder weaponry in the hands of our enemies?”

“Let me guess,” Hecht said. Loosing his sardonic side. “As long as it takes someone to work out a good formula for the stuff?”

Rhuk snorted. “If that was true we’d be up to our asses in bad guys with firepowder toys. The formula ain’t no secret. Every apothecary and chemist in Brothe knows it. What they don’t know is how to put them together. If it was me, I’d have somebody I really trusted permanently installed at Krulik and Sneigon. I’d babysit them day and night. I’d use somebody who’d cut a throat anytime the mood hit him. Somebody who ain’t weasel enough to get rich on the bribes he was gonna be offered.”

The Captain-General did not want to operate that way. But he saw the point. Men who wanted a fast profit, right now, would happily sell the most wonderfully murderous tools to the worst enemies of their own state or people, somehow oblivious to the fact that those weapons might bite back.

The Rhûn had a ferocious secret weapon. They called it nephron. It was a thick, heavy liquid that, once fired, could not be extinguished. It had to burn itself out. Rhûnish merchants would not sell the formula but willingly sold nephron itself, even to Sha-lug who used it against the Eastern Empire’s soldiers.

Human minds did not seem large enough to encompass an obligation to eschew profit if making it required providing a means to destroy one’s neighbor.

Pinkus Ghort said, “Hey, Pipe. You lost in there?”

“What?”

“You went away someplace inside your head. I was afraid you got lost.”

“It isn’t that vast a landscape, Pinkus. Pinkus, knowing you, you’ve found a source for the best wine in town. And you’ve found some way to get in touch with what’s going on in the underworld.”

Ghort gestured with both hands, as though playing with a balance scale—or pair of breasts. “Thus. So. I try. But, really, all I need to do is put on a show that’ll keep the senate happy.”

“Bronte Doneto is who you need to keep happy. Him and the old men of the Church. Not the old men of the city.”

Ghort shrugged. “Pretty much the same crew.”

“They’re wearing you down. Aren’t they?”

Ghort shrugged again. “How can you tell?”

“You don’t even bother to talk bad about them.”

“A man gets