Inkdeath Read Online Free PDF

He’s already been in jail for his lies, and that’s where he’ll end up again!"

    Orpheus narrowed his eyes. He didn’t like to have that chapter in his life mentioned at all.

    "I bet you were the sort who cons money out of old ladies’ pockets. And here you are all puffed up like a bullfrog just because your lies are suddenly coming true. You suck up to the Milksop because he’s the Adderhead’s brother-in-law and think yourself cleverer than anyone else! But what can you really do? Write fairies here who look like they’ve fallen into a vat of dye, chests full of treasure, and jewelry made of elves’ wings for him. But you can’t do what we brought you here for, you can’t do that. Dustfinger is dead. He’s dead. He — is — still — dead!"

    And now here came those wretched tears again. Farid wiped them away with his dirty fingers while the Chunk stared down at him as blankly as only someone who doesn’t understand a word of what’s being said can. And how could he? What did Oss know about the words Orpheus was collecting on the siy, what did he know about the book and Orpheus’s voice?

    "No one brought me here for anything!" Orpheus leaned over the edge of the pit as if to spit the words into Farid’s face. "And I certainly don’t have to listen to any lectures about Dustfinger from the boy who caused his death! Have you forgotten how he sacrificed himself for you? Why, I knew his name before you were even born, and I and no one else will bring him back, after you so drastically removed him from this story . . . but how and when I do it will be my own decision. Now dig. Or do you think, you brilliant example of the wisdom of Arabia"— Farid thought he felt the words slicing through him — "do you think I’ll be more likely to write if I can’t pay my maids and I have to wash my own clothes?"

    Damn him. Damn him to hell. Farid bowed his head so that Orpheus wouldn’t see his tears. The boy who caused his death.

    "Tell me why I keep paying minstrels good silver for their pitiful songs. Because I’ve forgotten Dustfinger? No. It’s because you still haven’t managed to find out how and where in this world I can speak to the White Women who have him now! So I go on listening to bad songs, I stand beside dying beggars, I bribe the healers in the infirmaries to call me when a patient is at death’s door. Of course, it would be much easier if, like your master, you could summon the White Women with fire, but we’ve tried that often enough and gotten nowhere, right? If at least they’d visit you, as it seems they like to visit those they’ve touched once with death already — but no! The fresh chicken blood I put outside the door was no use, either, nor were the children’s bones I bought from a gravedigger for a bag of silver after the guards at the gate told you that was sure to raise a dozen White Women at once!"

    Yes, yes! Farid wanted to put his hands over his ears. Orpheus was right. They’d tried everything, but the White Women simply didn’t appear to them, and who else was to tell Orpheus how to bring Dustfinger back from the dead?

    Without a word, Farid pulled his shovel out of the ground and began digging again.

    He had blisters on his hands by the time he finally struck wood. The chest he pulled out of the ground wasn’t very large, but like the last one it was filled to the brim with silver coins. Farid had been listening when Orpheus read it there: Under the gallows on the Dark Hill, long before the Prince of Sighs had the oaks there felled for his son’s coffin, a band of highwaymen had buried a casket of silver in the ground. Then they killed each other in a quarrel, but the silver still lay there in the earth, with their bones bleaching above it.

    The wood of the chest was rotten, and as with the other treasures he had dug up, Farid wondered whether the silver might not have been lying under the gallows even before Orpheus wrote his words. If asked such questions