"Esther M. Friesner - At These Prices" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

low. When he lifted it, his face had changed from that of a middle-aged man to
something out of the Middle Ages, no man by any means. Such a face belonged
outside a great cathedral, with a rainspout in its mouth. Bella took one look at
Bixby’s cloud-gray skin and grotesque features—goggling eyes worthy of a
purebred Boston bull-terrier, lips that stretched from ear to pointed, flapping ear, a
nose like a healthy young eggplant—and exclaimed, “What the hell are you?”
“Your humble and obedient servant, milady,” Bixby replied. “A brownie by
birth and breeding, and entirely at your command. Speak, and if my small magics or
my strong arms can fulfill your desires, it shall be done.”
To Bella’s knowledge, brownies were either pastries or troops of
cookie-flogging pipsqueaks, but she was a quick study. “Does that mean I get three
wishes?”
“I’m no genie, milady,” Bixby replied with a shake of his head. “We brownies
are domestic sprites whose powers are limited solely to keeping our masters’ homes
and hearths in good working order.”
“If you’re a house-thingie, what are you doing in a hotel?”
“Ah, my lady is as wise as she is ... interesting looking,” Bixby said. “In days
of yore, in the Old Country, the family Tiernan ran an inn out of their own home, as
was the custom. They were good folk, and wise as well in the ways of the Little
People. They knew enough to court our favor with a saucer of milk on the doorstep
and the occasional barrel of beer set out on Midsummer’s Eve.
“But times do change, if loyalties do not, and when the last of the Tiernan
deserted the Old Country for these shores, swearing to open an inn in the New
World, we could not bear to be parted from him.”
“More like you couldn’t bear to be parted from the free beer,” Bella remarked.
Bixby shrugged shoulders as curved as the side of an earthenware pot. “If
only our bond to the Tiernan had been limited to beer! But once in this land, the
world turned upside-down. One night, a mere two hundred years ago, our master
was moved to sit upon his doorsill with a cup of the sacred brew in his hands. In an
absent-minded moment, he left it there when he went in to bed, and there, alas, we
found it.” Bixby sighed.
“Wait a minute,” Bella held up one finger. “Are you telling me that you got
hooked on coffee after one cup?”
“One sip,” Bixby corrected her. “I was not the only one to whom our master
owed the bond of nightly tribute. We all of us partook, and so became enslaved to
the sacred brew.”
“All? How many of you little buggers are there?” Bella asked. Bixby said a
number. “That many? Jesus.”
“Of course I am counting the staff in all the hotels in the Tiernan Group
chain,” the brownie clarified. “For in time, our master’s business thrived, growing
from a simple wayside inn to a lodging empire.”
“All for the price of a cup of coffee per worker per day?”
“Well, we prefer cinnamon lattés. And a nice piece of cherry danish now and
then never killed anyone, but the sacred brew is enough to retain our services.”
“Now that’s what I call getting value for money.” Bella glowered at the
brownie. “You’d think those Tiernan Group greedheads would pass the savings on
to the guest, or at least not make such a stink when a poor, hard-working woman
takes one or two insignificant little items from one of these overpriced broom
closets.”
“As milady says.” Bixby fell naturally into his