The Gates of the World #3: The Brass God by K. M. McKinley

Author:K. M. McKinley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Solaris

WHY VAND WANTED Jolyon dead didn’t matter to Filden. Vand did not advance an explanation, and Filden did not ask for one. A life of following orders, mostly unsavoury in nature, had blunted what little curiosity he once had. Filden genuinely did respect Vand. However, unlike Vand, who needed approval and praise, and pursued his engineering and archeological plundering for the acclaim as much as the wealth, for Filden money was a greater motivator than any form of respect, whether given or received.

Filden liked money. He did not look it, but he was a rich man already, with hundreds of thousands of thalers secreted in the banks of four different kingdoms. He had planned to earn a small fortune and retire young. The problem with small fortunes is that, once acquired, it is rarely fortune enough. Filden wanted more. His ambitions for a townhouse in Perus became dreams of a castle in Marceny; one young lover became several, and so the desire for tens of thousands became the need for hundreds of thousands. By the time he was thirty-six, he had exceeded his original goal. He did not stop. From his forties onward he continued to accumulate money. Every fortune gained was the catalyst for greater avarice, until the gathering of wealth became the end rather than the means, and his dreams receded into memory.

His humanity had been scooped out of him piece by piece by the demands made by his former masters. His own greed concluded the process. He wasn’t a man born with a surfeit of kindness anyway. Perhaps he could be no other way, and his path in life was inevitable, but Filden wasn’t introspective enough to think about all of that. Questions that would have kept a more moral man awake all night went unasked.

Filden slept very well.

And so, for reasons that he almost grasped but never would, he found himself pursuing murder yet again, many years after he thought he would be done with it.

Guider Jolyon had been smart enough to leave the dig in Farthia, but not smart enough to go very far away. Nor was he as holy as his office suggested. Filden followed him from a low-class tavern in the Locksides, down the stepped streets that led eventually toward the sucking mud of the foreshore. In the warren of warehouses and boarding houses crowding the cliffs there were many brothels. The order of business for most sailors coming into Karsa city was drink, sex, and sleep, in that order. Other men in need of discretion took advantage of the facilities that sprang up to service those needs.

A series of unseasonably high tides had spurred a flurry of trading, and the port was crowded. Filden followed Jolyon at a distance, but without undue care. He behaved as if he had business in the thronging quays of Karsa’s port. Skipping from shadow to shadow was the easiest way for a man to be noticed. He’d exchanged his gold and green suit of clothes for a merchant’s garb, and he walked with purpose.

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