Dinner at Deviant's Palace Read Online Free PDF Page A

through his hair, disarranging it. “Ten thousand fifths of your Currency brandy; a bank draft for five thousand now, and another of the same when and if I can bring Urania back inside the Ellay walls.”
    “You misunderstood. Five thousand is the total price.”
    “Montecruz went up to ten.”
    “Montecruz must have got carried away in his anxiety. I think that’s understandable. But there’s no—”
    “That’s something you can take up with him later,” Rivas said. “I’m taking the offer that was made to me.”
    “The price I’m offering,” said Barrows angrily, “is still much more than you’ve ever been paid before.”
    The door was pulled open from the outside and Mojo hobbled in, set the fresh beer on the table, took the old glasses and exited.
    “Evidently she’s worth five to you,” Rivas remarked matter-of-factly, “but not quite ten. Did you catch McAn’s address? Over Mister Lou’s on—”
    Barrows was staring at him with loathing. “This is interesting,” he interrupted in a tight voice. “I had thought that extended use of the Jaybird sacrament always simply eroded the intelligence of the communicant, but I see it can do far worse than that—I see it can destroy the person’s empathy, his very humanity , leaving just a… sort of shrewd, cunning insect.”
    Rivas knew that anger was what Barrows wanted, so he leaned back and laughed. “Not bad, Barrows! I like it, write it down so I can use it in a song sometime.” He leaned forward and let his smile unkink. “And I hope you realize that a ‘shrewd, cunning insect,’ as you so diplomatically put it, is exactly what you need right now. Yes, I was a Jaybird for nearly three years after that night you drove me off the Barrows estate, and I have taken their devastating sacrament a number of times—as Urania is probably doing at this very moment, quite a thought, hmm?—though I pretty quick figured ways to blunt its effects, make my mind inaccessible to it. But that’s why I’m the only guy who’s been any kind of successful at prying people out of Jaybush’s hands… or off his dinner plate, let’s say; I’m sure you like that better, you being such a fan of colorful metaphors, right?”
    The door was pulled open again, but this time it was the furiously grinning Steve Spink that leaned in. “You gonna get back out here, Greg? People are beginning to leave, and I remember what you said about always filling the place to overflowing.”
    Rivas had a quick, involuntary vision of himself as he’d probably be if he lost this job and blew the Barrows redemption deal—a no longer young man fiddling for jiggers on a Dogtown corner, his beard thick and bushy and no longer a daring, carefully trimmed symbol of straddling the line dividing the upper classes from the lower—but he took a leisurely sip of the beer and managed to sound unconcerned when he said, “I’ll be back up there in a minute, Steve. They aren’t going to forget who I am between now and then.”
    “Hope you’re sure of that, Greg,” Spink said with a couple of extra teeth showing in his grin. Then he noticed Rivas’s companion. “Say, that’s the old guy who was—”
    “I know, Steve. One more minute.”
    The door closed again, muting the crowd sounds, and Rivas turned to Barrows with raised eyebrows. “Well?”
    “Okay,” the old man said quietly. “Ten. Five now and five when you bring her back.”
    “Done. See me after the show tonight to set up the details.”
    Barrows nodded, got to his feet and edged around the table to the door, but paused. “Oh, by the way,” he said uncertainly.
    Rivas looked up, clearly impatient.
    “Uh, there’s something that’s been… puzzling me for thirteen years. Maybe I shouldn’t ask.”
    Rivas was afraid he knew what was coming, but he said, “Yes?” casually.
    “Why—excuse me, I don’t by any means insist on an answer—but on that night I had you driven off, why were you behind those bushes on your