The Anvil of the World

How beautiful is Salesh, that white city by the sea, in festival time!

Her broad ways are strung with bright lanterns, and banners of purple and crimson stream from her high towers. Slender Youth runs laughing in gilded sandals through her gardens, pulling fragrant roses down to scatter the petals, and Age lies sated on cushions by her winepresses, tonguing the goblet of life for its last drop of pleasure. Smoke of sweet incense rises from her braziers, rises with the music of sistrums, citherns, tambours, lyres, and trumpets brazen-throated. Here lovers come as bees to the comb, rolling in honey of unbridled excess, for in Festival time in Salesh nothing is forbidden. The god of the flesh raises his staff in benign blessing on his votaries, and sweet Delight leads the merry dance!

Or so it says on the brochure put out by the Festival Guild. Needless to say, it’s hard to find a hotel room in Salesh at that time of year.

In anticipation of the busy holiday, Smith was cleaning out the drains at the Hotel Grandview.

It was the first time he’d done it in all the months he’d been the hotel’s proprietor. The Children of the Sun tended to be forgetful in matters regarding ecosystems both large and small, and he had been content all this while to send the Grandview’s waste down its main flush pipe without ever wondering where it Went afterward.

However, when he had received a notice that the Grandview was due for its first safety inspection, and noted that drains were foremost on the list of things to be inspected, it occurred to him that he’d better have a look at them first. On prising up the iron trap just outside the hotel’s kitchen, he was astonished to discover that the barrel-wide pipe below was almost completely blocked with a solid greenish sludge, leaving an aperture for flow no bigger around than an average drinking straw.

Smith knelt on the paving stones, staring at it in bewilderment, while his staff stood looking on unhelpfully.

“You know, some of the gentlemen and ladies been complaining their washbasins drain slow,” offered Porter Crucible. “I’ll bet that’s why.”

“What do I do now?” said Smith plaintively. He looked up at the porters. “I guess we’ll just have to get scrapers and take turns digging it out.”

The porters took a step back, in perfect unison.

“That’s as much as our Porters’ Union certificates are worth, you know,” said Crucible. “We’re already on ten-year probation from transferring out of the Keymen’s Union.”

“Anyway, we couldn’t get our shoulders down that pipe,” added Pinion. “And you couldn’t either, come to that.”

“Somebody small and skinny could, though,” added Bellows, and they turned to stare at Burnbright. She backed away, looking outraged.

“There’s a Message Runners’ Union too,” she protested. “And I would not either fit down there! I’ve got breasts now, you know. And hips!”

Which was true; she had recently grown those very items, and filled out her scarlet uniform snugly enough to be ogled by gentlemen guests when she raced through the hotel bar.

“Nine Hells,” muttered Smith, and clambered to his feet. “I’ll dig it out as far as I can. Where’s a shovel?”

“What were you on about just now?” Mrs. Smith, emerging from the kitchen, inquired of Burnbright. She wiped her hands on her apron and peered down at the opened drain. “Great heavens! What a disgusting mess. No wonder the drains are sluggish.” She pulled out a smoking tube and packed it with fragrant amberleaf.

“It’s got to be cleared before the safety inspectors get here,” said Smith, who had found a shovel and now stuck it experimentally into the sludge. The sludge, which was roughly the consistency of hard cheese, fought back.

“Oh, you’ll never get rid of it like that,” Mrs. Smith advised, flicking the flint-and-steel device with which she lit her amberleaf. She took a drag, waved away smoke, and explained: “There’s a fearfully caustic chemical you can buy. You just pour it down the drain, leave it to dissolve everything away, and Hey Presto! Your drains are whisper-fresh by morning. Or so the chemists claim.”

“Doesn’t that pipe drain into the open ocean?” asked Crucible.

“Haven’t the slightest idea,” said Mrs. Smith. She eyed Burnbright. “You’re young and agile; jump up there, child, and investigate.”

Burnbright scrambled up on the edge of the parapet and hung the upper part of her body over, peering down the cliff.

“Yes!” she cried. “I can see where it comes out! Big trail of slime goes right into the sea!”

“No problem, then!” said Smith cheerfully, putting back the shovel. “Can we buy that stuff in bulk?”

By midafternoon the porters had brought back ten barrels of tempered glass marked SCOURBRASS’S FOAMING WONDER, with instructions stenciled in slightly smaller letters underneath that and, smaller still, a scarlet skull and crossbones followed by the words: POISON. Use caution when handling. Not to be added to soups, stews, or casseroles. Smith mixed up the recommended dosage for particularly long-standing clogs and poured it into the drain. He was gratified to see a jet of livid green foam rise at once, as though fighting to escape from the pipe, then sink back, bubbling ominously. He stacked the opened barrel next to the hotel’s toolshed, beside the nine unopened ones, and returned to the kitchen in a happy mood.

“Looks like that stuff’s working,” he said to Mrs. Smith, who was busy jamming a small plucked and boned bird up the gaping nether orifice of a somewhat larger boned bird. “Er—what’s this?”

“Specialty dish of the evening,” she panted. “Hard-boiled egg in a quail in a rock hen in a duck in a goose in a sea dragon, and the whole thing roasted and glazed in fruit syrup and served with a bread sauce. Miserably complicated to make, but it’s expected at Festival time, and besides"—she gave a final shove and the smaller bird vanished at last, “—rumor hath it there’s some sort of journalist has booked a table for this evening, and it always pays to impress the restaurant critics.”

Smith nodded. The Hotel Grandview was an old building with uncertain plumbing in a distinctly unfashionable part of town, but its restaurant had a steadily growing gourmet clientele that was keeping them in business. That was entirely due to Mrs. Smith’s ability to turn a sausage or a handful of cold oatmeal into cuisine fit for anybody’s gods, let alone the gastronomes of a seaside resort.

“So I shall need Burnbright to run down to that Yendri shop for a sack of those funny little yellow plums, because they’ll fit in the sea dragon’s eye sockets after it’s cooked and give it a fearfully lifelike air,” Mrs. Smith added.

“I’ll send her now,” said Smith, filching a piece of crisply fried eel from a tray and wandering out in search of Burnbright.

He was expecting a certain amount of whining. He was right.

“I hate going into Greenietown!” wailed Burnbright. “They always look at me funny! They’re all a bunch of oversexed savages.”

“Look, they’re not going to rape you,” Smith told her. “They have to take a vow they won’t do anything like that before they’re allowed to open shops in our cities.”

“Well, they’re always lying in wait by the mountain roads and raping our long-distance messengers,” claimed Burnbright. “At the Mount Flame Mother House for Runners—”

“Do you know anybody that’s ever actually happened to?”

“No, but everybody knows—”

“You can run all the way back,” Smith told her, slipping a coin into her hand and gently ushering her toward the hotel’s front door.

“Why can’t Smith or Bellows or one of them go?” Burnbright persisted.

“Because they’ve gone up to the caravan depot to pick up Lord Ermenwyr’s trunks,” said Smith.

“Eeew,” said Burnbright, and sped out the door.

She did not particularly care for Lord Ermenwyr either, despite the fact that he was the Hotel Grandview’s patron. Burnbright’s immediate disfavor was due to the fact that Lord Ermenwyr consistently made overtures of an improper nature to her during his frequent visits, and she thought he was a creepy little man, patron or no.

Smith ducked into the bar to see if all was going well, took a brief detour through the indoor section of the restaurant (silent as a temple at that hour, with its folded napkins and crystal set out expectantly) and slipped behind his desk to look over the guestbook. The Grandview was full up with reservations, as he’d hoped it would be for the holiday. His eye fell on the name just below Lord Ermenwyr’s: Sharplin Coppercut.

Smith knit his brows, thinking the name was familiar. Some kind of journalist? Maybe the food critic Mrs. Smith was expecting? As he wondered, a thin shadow moved across the doorway and a thin and elegantly dressed man followed after it. Behind him a city porter struggled with a ponderous trunk.

The elegant man came straight to the desk, moving silent as his shadow, and in a quiet voice said; “Sharplin Coppercut.”

Smith blinked at him a moment, “Oh!” he said belatedly, “You have a reservation. Right, here you are: Room 2. It’s just up those stairs, sir, first door on the left. Come to have fun at the Festival, have you?”

“I do hope so,” said Coppercut, stamping the ledger with his house sign. He replaced his seal in its pendant box and swept the lobby with a penetrating gaze. “Have you a runner on the premises?”

“Yes, sir, we’re a fully equipped hotel. We can send your correspondence anywhere in the city. She’s stepped out for a moment, but I’ll be happy to send her up as soon as she gets back, sir,” Smith offered.

“Please do,” said Coppercut, showing his teeth. He went upstairs as quietly as he had done everything else, though the porter thumped and labored after him, cursing under the weight of the trunk.

Then there was a commotion of another kind entirely, for in through the street door came two of the biggest men Smith had ever seen. They were built like a pair of brick towers. That they managed to get through the doorway side by side was extraordinary; it seemed necessary to bend time and space to do it. They had to come in side by side, however, for they bore on their massive shoulders the front traces of a costly looking palanquin. Into the lobby it came, and two more giants bearing the rear traces ducked their heads to follow. They were followed by a tall Yendri, who wore the plain white robe of a physician. Behind them came Porters Crucible, Pinion, Old Smith, Bellows, and New Smith, bearing each no less than three trunks.

“Smith,” hissed a voice from within the palanquin. “Is the lobby empty?”

“At the moment,” Smith replied.

In response, the palanquin’s curtains parted, and Lord Ermenwyr slid forth, nimble as a weasel. He straightened up and stood peering around warily. He wore an inky black ensemble that contrasted sharply with the unnatural pallor of his skin. He wore also a pomaded beard and curled mustaches, and clenched between his teeth a jade smoking tube from which a sickly green fume trailed.

“Safe at last,” he muttered. “Hello, Smith; we’re traveling incognito, you see, I mean even more so than usual, hence all the cloak-and-dagger business, and I don’t suppose you’ve got my suite key ready, have you, Smith?”

“Right here, my lord,” said Smith, handing it over the counter. Lord Ermenwyr took it and bolted for the stairs, with the tails of his coat flying out behind him. His palanquin-bearers gaped after him; then, exchanging glances, they hoisted the palanquin after them and lumbered toward the staircase. They got it up into the hall with inches to spare, tugging awkwardly. The Yendri bowed apologetically to Smith.

“His lordship is somewhat agitated,” he said.

“That’s all right,” Smith assured him. “As soon as you give him his fix, he’ll calm down.”

The Yendri looked shocked. Smith realized that he was quite a young man, slender and smooth-faced, and though his features would undoubtedly one day be as harshly angular as the others of his race, he had at the moment a certain poetic look. His stammered reply was cut short by a shriek from upstairs: “Willowspear! For Hell’s sake, my medication!”

“See?” said Smith. The Yendri hurried upstairs.

“What was all that?” demanded Mrs. Smith, emerging from the kitchen with a frown, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Lord Ermenwyr’s arrived,” Smith explained.

“Oh,” she said. “Who was that he was yelling after?”

“He’s got a doctor with him,” said Smith.

“Instead of Madam Balnshik, this time? I never saw such a hypochondriac in my life,” stated Mrs. Smith. “Do you suppose the doctor knows about…?”

“He’d have to, wouldn’t he?” said Smith. “By the way, I think your food critic’s arrived.”

“Ah!” Mrs. Smith edged sidelong behind the desk to look at the register. She studied it a moment. “Let’s see… Coppercut?” she scowled. “No, no. That man doesn’t write restaurant reviews. Far from it! He’s a—”

“Here we are!” caroled Lord Ermenwyr, sliding gracefully down the banister of the staircase. The four giants hurried after him, taking the stairs, however, and followed at a slight distance by the Yendri doctor.

“My lord—” he gasped.

“All together again!” Lord Ermenwyr landed with a crash and skittered across the lobby. His pupils had gone to pinpoints. “Good old Smith! You’ve had the drains cleaned since I was here last, haven’t you? And Mrs. Smith, how charming to see you! Nursie sends her best, she’d have been here but Mother had another damned baby"—here the giants and the Yendri doctor bowed involuntarily—"and Nursie adores babies, obsessed with the horrible little things in all their lace and woolies and whatnot—I keep warning everyone that they’ll find a cradle full of tiny gnawed bones one of these days, but nobody listens. Smith! Good to see you! Have I checked in yet?”

“No, Master,” one of the giants reminded him, in a terrifyingly deep voice with slightly odd enunciation. Smith looked at him sharply and exchanged a glance with Mrs. Smith.

“How careless of me.” Lord Ermenwyr took out his seal and stamped HOUSE KINGFISHER in five places on the register’s page. “And I haven’t done introductions yet, have I? Smith, Mrs. Smith, these are my bodyguards: Cutt, Crish, Stabb, and Strangel. Aren’t those great names? And this is my personal physician.” He waved a hand at the Yendri. “Agliavv Willowspear. A man who knows his antidepressants!”

Willowspear bowed.

“Yes, yes, I know he’s a greenie, but he’s utterly trustworthy,” said Lord Ermenwyr in a stage whisper. “Known him all my life. Mother’s always succoring defenseless orphans, alas. Anyway, I had to bring him; he’s one of Mother’s disciples and he’s on a vision quest or something, isn’t that right, Willowspear?”

“In a manner of speaking, my lord,” said Willowspear.

“A vision quest to Salesh at festival time?” said Mrs. Smith, regarding him keenly.

“Yes, lady.” Willowspear drew himself up and met her gaze. “My father, Hladderin Willowspear—”

Burnbright entered clutching a small bag presumably containing yellow plums, and, seeing Lord Ermenwyr at the desk, did her best to tiptoe through to the kitchen unobserved. About three paces on, however, her gaze riveted on Willowspear. Her mouth fell open, but she made no sound and kept moving forward, though her gaze remained on the Yendri. The result was that she walked straight into a chair and fell over it with a crash.

Everyone turned to stare at her.

“And it’s little Burnbright!” yodeled Lord Ermenwyr, vaulting the back of a sofa to land beside her and pull her to her feet. “Nine Hells, you’ve grown tits! When did that happen?”

“Girls grow up overnight, they say,” Smith explained, moving between them quickly, closely followed by Willowspear.

“Don’t they, just? Burnbright, runner dearest, you’ll have to come recite the latest news for me tomorrow, eh?” Lord Ermenwyr leered around Smith at her. “Private little tete-a-tete in my chamber? I like the morning report over my tea and pastry. I have breakfast in bed, too. Wouldn’t you like—”

“Her knee is bleeding,” Willowspear pointed out. Burnbright took her eyes from him for the first time and peered down at her leg dazedly. “Oh,” she said. “It is.”

“Well!” Lord Ermenwyr cried. “I’ll allot you the services of my personal physician to tend to it, how about that? Off to the kitchen with her, Willowspear, and plaster up that gorgeous leg, and make sure the other one’s undamaged, while you’re at it. She earns her living with those, after all.” “That would be beautiful—I mean—nice,” said Burnbright. “And as soon as he’s done, you’ve got a customer in Room 2,” Smith told her.

“Right,” she said, wide-eyed, as Willowspear took her hand and led her away.

“I’m talking too much, aren’t I?” said Lord Ermenwyr, looking around with an abrupt change of mood. “Oh, God, I need to get laid. Not safe, though. Smith, might we have a cozy chat in the bar? Just you and I and the bodyguards? There are a few little things you need to know.”

Mrs. Smith rolled her eyes. Smith muttered a silent prayer to his ancestors, but said, “Right away, lord.”

At that moment another guest arrived with some fanfare, a well-to-do lady who had apparently donned her festival costume early and seemed to be going as the Spirit of the Waters, to judge from the blue body paint and strategically placed sequins. Two goggle-eyed city porters followed her, with trunks that presumably contained the clothes she was not wearing.

Smith braced himself, expecting Lord Ermenwyr to engage in another display of sofa-vaulting; to his immense relief, instead the lordling gave the woman an oddly furtive look and plucked at Smith’s sleeve.

“I’ll just step into the bar now, if you don’t mind,” he muttered. “Pray join me when you’ve got a minute.”

He slunk away, with the bodyguards bumping into one another somewhat as they attempted to follow closely.

Smith stepped behind his desk to register the Spirit of the Waters, or Lady Shanriana of House Goldspur as she was known when in her clothes. Mrs. Smith lingered, seemingly loath to go back to the kitchen just yet.

When Lady Shanriana was safely on her way upstairs to her room, Mrs. Smith leaned close and said quietly, “Those are demons the lordling’s got with him.”

“That’s what I thought,” Smith replied. “With a glamour on them, I guess.”

“I can always tell when somebody’s talking around a pair of tusks, no matter how well they’re hidden. The accent’s unmistakable,” said Mrs. Smith. “But perhaps they’ll mind their manners. Nurse Balnshik was capable of civilized behavior, as I recall.”

Smith shivered pleasurably, remembering the kind of behavior of which Nurse Balnshik had been capable.

“She didn’t have tusks, of course,” he said irrelevantly.

At that moment Burnbright and Willowspear returned from the kitchen. She seemed to be leaning on his arm to a degree disproportionate to the tininess of the sticking plaster on her knee.

“I’ve never heard of using hot water and soap on a cut,” she was saying breathlessly. “It seems so simple! But then, you probably said some sort of spell over it too, didn’t you? Because there’s really no pain at all—”

“There you are, Willowspear,” said Lord Ermenwyr edgily, popping out of the bar. “I need you to check my pulse. Where’s Smith?”

“Just coming, lord,” said Smith, stepping from behind the counter. “And, Burnbright? You need to step up to Room 2.”

“Oh. All right,” she said, and climbed the stair unsteadily.

Smith and Willowspear followed Lord Ermenwyr into the bar, where he retreated to the farthest darkest booth and sat looking pointedly back and forth between Smith and the barman. Smith took the hint.

“Seven pints of Black Ship Stout, Rivet, then go mind the front desk for a bit,” he said. Rivet looked bewildered, but complied.

When they were settled in the booth (all but the bodyguards, who would never have fit in there anyway but made a solid wall in front of it) Lord Ermenwyr had a gulp of his pint, leaned forward in the gloom, and said, “I’m afraid I’m in certain difficulties, Smith.”

Smith groaned inwardly, but had a bracing quaff of his own pint, and said merely, “Difficulties, you say.”

“Yes, and it’s necessary I…hem… lie low for a while. That’s why I’m here.”

Smith thought to himself that his lordship could scarcely have chosen a more public place to go to ground than a resort hotel at Festival time, but he raised an eyebrow and said, “Really?”

“Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking, but I have my reasons!” Lord Ermenwyr snapped. “I’d better explain. I belong to certain, shall we say, professional organizations? Hereditary membership, thanks to Daddy. The AFA, the WWF, NPNS, BSS—”

“And those would be?”

“Ancient Fraternity of Archmagi,” Lord Ermenwyr explained impatiently. “World Warlocks’ Federation. Ninth Plane Necromancers’ Society. Brotherhood of Sages and Seers. To name but a few. And I, er, seem to have made an enemy.

“It all started when I attended this banquet and wore all my regalia from all the groups of which I’m a member. Well, apparently that wasn’t considered quite in good taste, as some of the societies aren’t on the best of terms, but I’m new at this so how was I supposed to know? And several people took offense that I was wearing the Order of the Bonestar on the same side of my chest as the Infernal Topaz Cross and carrying the Obsidian Rod in my left hand.

“Just a silly little misunderstanding, you see? But one gentleman was rather more vocal than the rest of them. He’d been drinking, and I’d been, mmm, self-medicating, and I might have been clever at his expense or something, because he seems to have developed a dislike for me quite out of all proportion to anything I may or may not have said.”

Smith drank the rest of his pint in a gulp. “Go on,” he said, feeling doomed already.

“And then we ran for the same guild office, and I won,” Lord Ermenwyr. “I even won fairly. Well, reasonably fairly. But evidently this gentleman had wanted all his life to be the Glorious Slave of Scharathrion, and that I of all people should have dashed his hopes was too much. Rather silly, considering that all the title amounts to is being treasurer to a fraternity of pompous idiots obsessed with power; but there it is, and he’s decided to kill me.”

“All right,” said Smith patiently. “And that’s not against the club rules?”

Lord Ermenwyr squirmed in his seat. “Not as such, because he’s filed a formal declaration of intent to challenge me to a duel. Out of all the interminable number of fraternal bylaws, he got hold of one that’ll permit him to take my office if he defeats me in formal combat.

“Of course, he’s got to find me to do that,” he added, snickering.

“And so you’re hiding out here?”

“Exactly,” Lord Ermenwyr replied. “Perfect place for it! Magi are an antisocial lot, because they think they’re cleverer than everyone else, so what better place for me to dodge him than in the midst of the mundane mob he so detests? These duels always take place on a blasted heath or a mountaintop or somewhere equally dramatic. He won’t want to stoop to showing off his wizardly prowess in Salesh High Street, not he!”

“You haven’t touched that beer,” Smith said to Willowspear. “Don’t you drink?”

“No, sir, not alcohol,” Willowspear replied, pushing the glass toward him. “Please, help yourself.”

“Thanks.” Smith took the stout and drank deep before asking Lord Ermenwyr, “You haven’t tried to buy your enemy off?”

“That was the first thing I did, when I saw how he was taking it,” Lord Ermenwyr admitted, his gleam of glee fading somewhat. “ ‘Here,’ I said, ‘you can take your old staff of office, I don’t want it. Be the Glorious Slave of Scharathrion, if it means that much to you!’ But he insists it has to be bought in blood. Mine, I need hardly add. So I took to my heels.”

“What about—” Smith looked around furtively. “What about your lord father?”

All four of the bodyguards genuflected, slopping their drinks somewhat.

“He’s no use at all,” said Lord Ermenwyr bitterly. “He said that any son of his ought to be able to make mincemeat of a third-rate philtermonger like Blichbiss, and it was high time I learned to stand on my own and be a man, et cetera et cetera ad infinitum, and I said, ‘I hate you, Daddy,’ and ran like hell. And here I am.”

“Master, you mustn’t speak of the Master of Masters that way,” Cutt growled gently. “He is confident his noble offspring will bring swift and hideous death to his enemies, followed by an eternity of exquisite torment.”

“Oh, shut up and watch the door,” Lord Ermenwyr told him.

“So—you didn’t come here because you want me to kill this man for you,” Smith ventured.

“You?” Lord Ermenwyr gave a brief bark of laughter. “Oh, no no no! Dear old Smith, you’re the best at your trade (I mean, your former trade) I’ve ever seen, but Blichbiss is a mage! Way out of your league. No, all I need you to do is keep my visit here a secret. I’m just going to lurk in my suite until the problem goes away. I’ll have my meals sent up, and a courtesan or two, and if the luscious little Burnbright will keep me posted on local news and go out for my prescriptions now and then, I ought to get along famously. And … er … if you could manage to find a sheep for the boys to kill every couple of days, that would be nice too,” he added.

“When you do you think it’ll blow over?” Smith asked. “I’d always heard magi had long memories.”

“He’ll have to give up eventually,” Lord Ermenwyr assured him. “Don’t look so worried! It’s not as though there’s going to be a battle, with bodies scattered all over your nice clean hotel.”

“And you can keep him healthy?” Smith asked Willowspear.

“As healthy as I ever am,” said Lord Ermenwyr.

“I do the will of the Unwearied Mother,” said Willowspear, bowing his head. “And I will die, if necessary, to protect Her child.”

“I am not a child, I’m a slightly underage playboy, and there’s no need to get histrionic about it,” said Lord Ermenwyr testily. “We’re simply going to have a pleasant and very low-profile holiday by the sea.”

“Good, then,” said Smith, draining the second stout. “Because the hotel’s up for having its first safety inspection soon. It would be nice if nothing happened to queer things.”

“Oh, what could happen?” said Lord Ermenwyr breezily, lifting his glass.

Smith just shook his head, watching the lordling drink. He supposed that benign heavenly beings who incarnated into the flesh with the purpose of defeating worldly evil knew best how to go about their divine jobs; but surely there had been a better way to do it than singling out a Lord of Evil, marrying him, and forcing him to behave himself? Let alone bringing a lot of highly unstable and conflicted children into the world.

At least Lord Ermenwyr was only half a demon. Maybe only a quarter.

By evening the hotel was full and so was the restaurant, especially the outdoor terrace overlooking the bay, for Festival was scheduled to begin with a grand fireworks extravaganza. In keeping with the theme of unbridled sexual license to celebrate the primordial union of the First Ancestors, the fireworks really should have come at the end of Festival; but by that time the populace of Salesh was generally too sore and hungover to pay proper attention to further pyrotechnics.

The guests, resplendent in their body paint and masks, whooped and applauded as the bright rockets soared upward with a thrilling hiss, exploded into flowers of scarlet and emerald fire, and drifted down into the afterglow of sunset. Ships in the harbor ran colored lanterns up into their riggings and fired charges of colored paper from their cannons, so that streamers and confetti littered the tideline for days afterward. Partygoers rowed back and forth on the black water, occasionally colliding with other little boats and exchanging interesting passengers.

Barely audible all the way out on Salesh Municipal Pier, musicians played songs of love and longing to entice those who had not already paired off into the Pleasure Houses. The night was warm for spring, and the white waxen blossoms of Deathvine perfumed the air wherever they opened; so there were few who resisted the call to yield up their souls to delight.

“Where the hell are all our servers?” demanded Smith, struggling out to the center buffet with an immense tray that bore the magnificent Ballotine of Sea Dragon. Diners exclaimed in delight and pointed at its egg-gilded scales, its balefully staring golden eyes.

“The servers? Whanging their little brains out in the bushes, what do you think?” Crucible replied sourly. He took the ballotine from Smith and held it aloft with the artificial smile of a professional wrestler, acknowledging the diners’ cheers a moment, before setting it down and going to work on it with the carving knife.

“We’ve got to get more people out here! Where’s Burnbright?”

“She ran off crying,” said Crucible, sotto voce, producing the first perfectly stratified slice of dragon-goose-duck-hen-quail-egg and plopping it down on the plate of a lady who wore nothing but glitter and three large artificial sapphires.

“What?”

“Asked her what was the matter. She wouldn’t tell me. But I saw her talking to that doctor,” muttered Crucible, sawing away at another slice. He gave Smith a sidelong sullen glare. “If that bloody greenie’s been and done something to our girl, me and the boys will pitch him down the cliff. You tell his lordship so.”

“Hell—” Smith turned wildly to look up at the lit windows of the hotel. Lord Ermenwyr, like most of the other guests, was seated on his balcony enjoying the view of the fireworks. Cutt and Crish were ranged on one side of him, Stabb and Strangel on the other, and behind his chair Agliavv Willowspear stood. Willowspear was gazing down onto the terrace with an expression of concern, apparently searching through the crowd.

“Smith!” trumpeted Mrs. Smith, bearing a five-tiered cake across the terrace with the majesty of a ship under full sail. “Your presence is requested in the lobby, Smith.” As she drew near she added, “It’s Crossbrace from the City Wardens. I’ve already seen to it he’s got a drink.”

Smith felt a wave of mingled irritation and relief, for though this was probably the worst time possible to have to pass an inspection, Crossbrace was easygoing and amenable to bribes. Dodging around Bellows, who was carrying out a dish of something involving flames and fruit sauce, Smith paused just long enough to threaten a young pair of servers with immediate death if they didn’t crawl out from under the gazebo and get back to work. Then he straightened his tunic, ran his hands through his hair, and strode into the hotel, doing his best to look confident and cheerful.

“Smith!” Crossbrace toasted him with his drink, turning from an offhand examination of the hotel’s register. “Joyous couplings. Thought I’d find you joyously coupling with some sylph!”

“Joyous couplings to you, too,” said Smith heartily, noting that Crossbrace was in uniform rather than Festival undress. “Who has time to joyously couple when you’re catering the orgy? You’ve got a drink? Have you dined? We’ve got a Sea Dragon Ballotine out on the terrace that’s going fast!”

“Business first,” said Crossbrace regretfully. “Little surprise inspection. But I expect you’re all up to code, eh, in a first-class establishment like this?”

“Come and see,” said Smith, bowing him forward. “What are you drinking? Silverbush? Let me just grab us a bottle as we go through the bar.”

The inspection was cursory, and went well. No molds were discovered anywhere they didn’t belong. No structural deficiencies were found, nor any violations of Salesh’s codes regarding fire or flood safety. Crossbrace contented himself with limiting the upstairs inspection to a walk down the length of the corridor. Then they went back down to the kitchen, by which time they’d half emptied the bottle of Silverbush and some of the guests on the restaurant terrace were beginning to writhe together in Festival-inflamed passion.

“And you’ve got to see the drains, of course,” Smith insisted, opening the door into the back area. Crossbrace followed him out readily, and looked on as Smith, with a flourish, flung the trap wide.

“Look at that!”

“Damn, you could eat out of there,” said Crossbrace in admiration. He took down the area lamp and shined it into the drain, as the distant sound of erotic enchantment drifted across the water. “Beautiful! And that’s an old pipe, too. City records says this place was built back in Regent Kashlar’s time.”

“S’right,” affirmed Smith, refilling Crossbrace’s glass and having a good gulp himself from the bottle. “But they built solid back then.”

Somewhere close at hand, hoarse panting rose to a scream of ecstasy.

“Didn’t they, though?” Crossbrace had another drink. “What’s your secret?”

“Ah.” Smith laid a finger beside his nose. “Scourbrass’s Foaming Wonder! See?” He waved a hand at the ten canisters neatly stacked against the wall.

“That’s great stuff,” said Crossbrace, and stepped close to read the warning.

Smith heard, ominous under all the giggling and groaning, the sound of someone running through the kitchen. The area door flew open, and Pinion stared out at him, looking panic-stricken.

“Boss! Somebody’s gone and died in—”

Crossbrace straightened up abruptly and turned around. Pinion saw him and winced. “In Room 2,” he finished miserably.

“Oh, dear,” Crossbrace said, sobering with alchemical swiftness. “I suppose in my capacity as City Warden I’d better have a look, hadn’t I?”

Smith ground his teeth. They went back upstairs.

“He’d ordered room service,” Pinion explained. “Never called to have the dishes taken away. I went up to see was he done yet, and nobody answered the knock. Opened the door finally and it was dark in here, except for the light coming in from the terrace and a little fire on the hearth. And there he sits.”

Smith opened the door cautiously and stepped inside, followed by Crossbrace and Pinion. “Mr. Coppercut?” he called hopefully.

But the figure silhouetted against the window was dreadfully motionless. Crossbrace swore quietly and, finding a lamp, lit it.

Sharplin Coppercut sat at the writing table, sagging backward in his chair. His collar had been wrenched open, and he stared at the ceiling with bulging eyes and a gaping mouth, rather as though he was about to announce that he’d just spotted a particularly fearsome spider up there.

On the table across the room were the dishes containing his half-eaten meal. The chair had been pushed back and fallen, the napkin dropped to the floor, and a small table midway between the dinner table and the desk lay on its side, with the smoking apparatus it had held scattered across the carpet.

“That’s the Sharplin Coppercut, isn’t it?” said Crossbrace.

“He’s the only one I know of,” groaned Smith, going to the body to feel for a pulse. He couldn’t find one.

“Saw his name in the register. Dear, dear, Smith, you’ve got a problem on your hands,” stated Crossbrace.

“Oh, gods, he’s stone dead. Crossbrace, you know it wasn’t our food!”

“Sat down to eat his dinner,” theorized Crossbrace, studying the dining table. “Had his appetizer; ate it all but a bit of parsley. Drank half a glass of wine. Working his way through a plate of fried eel—that’s your house specialty, isn’t it?—when he comes over queer and needs air, so he loosens his collar and gets up to go to the window. Bit clumsy by this time, so he bumps over the smoking table on his way. Makes it to the chair and collapses, but dies before he can get the window open. That’s the way it looks, wouldn’t you say?”

“But there was nothing wrong with the eels,” Smith protested. “I had some myself this aftern—” He spotted something on the table and stared at it a moment. Then his face lit up.

“Yes! Crossbrace, come look at this! It wasn’t food poisoning at all!”

Crossbrace came around to look over the corpse’s shoulder. There, scrawled on a tablet bearing the Hotel Grand-view imprimis, were the words AVENGE MY MURD.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, this puts a different light on it.”

“Somebody killed him,” said Smith. “And he took the trouble to let us know!” He felt like embracing Coppercut. An accidental death by food poisoning could wreck a restaurant’s reputation, but a high-profile revenge slaying in one could only be considered good publicity.

“So somebody killed him,” said Crossbrace thoughtfully. “Gods know he had a lot of enemies. Poison in his wine? Poisoned dart through the window? Could have been a mage hired to do the job with a sending, for that matter. Look at the coals in the fireplace, what’d he want with a fire on such a warm night? Suspicious. Maybe a smoke efrit suffocated him? Lucky break for you, Smith.”

“Isn’t it?” Smith beamed at the corpse.

“But it makes a lot more work for me.” Crossbrace sighed. “I’ll have to get the morgue crew up here, then I’ll have to investigate and question everybody, which will take all bloody night. Then I’ll have to file a report in triplicate, and there’s his avengers to notify, because he must have kept some on retainer … and here it is Festival time, and I had an alcove booked at the Black Veil Club for tonight.”

“That’s a shame,” said Smith warily, sensing what was coming.

“It cost me a fortune to get that alcove, too. My lady friend will be furious. I think I’m going to do you a favor, Smith,” Crossbrace decided.

“Such as?”

“It’s Festival. I’m going to pretend this unfortunate incident hasn’t yet happened to stain your restaurant’s good name, all right? We both know it wasn’t food poisoning, but rumors get out, don’t they? And the funniest things will influence those clerks in the Permit Office.” Crossbrace swirled his drink and looked Smith in the eye.

“But we do have a famous dead man here something’s got to be done about. So I’ll come back in two days’ time, when Festival’s done and everything’s business as usual. You’ll have a body for me and not only that, you’ll have found out who, where, when, how, and why, so all I have to do is arrest the murderer, if possible, and file the paperwork. I’ll have a Safety Certificate for you. Everybody wins. Right?”

“Right,” said Smith, knowing a cleft stick when he saw one.

“See you after Festival, then,” said Crossbrace, and finished his drink. He handed the glass to Smith. “Thanks.”

Having sworn Pinion to secrecy and sent him down to serve food, Smith finished the bottle of Silverbush and indulged in some blistering profanity. As this accomplished nothing, he then proceeded to examine the room more closely, while the sounds of a full-scale orgy floated up from the terrace below.

There was no trace of anything suspicious on the uneaten food, nor anything that his nose could detect in the wine. The empty appetizer plate had held some sort of seafood, to judge from the smell, but that was all. No hint of Scour-brass’s Foaming Wonder, which relieved Smith very much.

He dragged Coppercut’s body to the bed, laid it out, and examined him with a professional’s eye for signs of subtle assassination. No tiny darts, no insect bites, no wounds in easily overlooked places; not even a rash. Coppercut was turning a nasty color and going stiff, but other than that he seemed fine.

Straightening up, Smith looked around the room and noticed that the low coals were smoking out in the fireplace. He approached it cautiously, in case there really was an efrit or something less pleasant in there, and bent down to peer in. The next moment he had grabbed a poker and was raking ashes out onto the hearth, but it was just about too late: for of the gray ruffled mass of paper ash there, only a few blackened scraps were left intact. Muttering to himself, he picked them up and carried them out to the circle of lamplight on the table. Writing. Bits of scrolls?

Spreading them out, turning them over, he found that some were in what was obviously a library scribe’s neat hand; others in a rushed-looking backhand that consistently left off letter elements, like the masts on the little ship that signified the th sound, or the pupil of the eye that stood for the suffix ln. Two hands, but no sense: He had the words journeyed swiftly to implore and so great was his and unnatural, also ghastly tragedy and swift anger and they could not escape.

Only one offered any clue at all. It said to the lasting sorrow of House Spellmetal, he—

The name Spellmetal was vaguely familiar to Smith. He knit his brows, staring at the fragment. House Spellmetal. Somebody wealthy, some dynasty that had suffered notoriety. When had that been? Ten years ago? Fifteen? More? Smith attempted to place where he’d been living when the name was in the news. And there had been a scandal, and the son and heir of House Spellmetal had died. A massacre of some kind, not a decent vendetta.

Smith turned and stared at the fireplace again. Now he noticed the scribe’s case sitting open in a chair. He went over and peered into it. Three-quarters empty, though it had clearly held more. Someone had pulled out most of the case’s contents and burned them.

“Blackmail,” he said aloud.

He looked speculatively at Sharplin Coppercut. Closing the scribe’s case and tucking it under his arm, Smith went out and locked the door behind him.

The dead man lay on his bed, staring up in horror. Below his window bosoms jiggled, thighs danced, bottoms quivered, tongues sought for nectar, and slender Youth kicked off its golden sandals and got down to business. Life pulsed and shivered, deliciously, deliriously, in every imaginable variation on one act; but it had finished with Sharplin Coppercut.

Mrs. Smith had retired when he went to her, and was sitting up in bed smoking, calmly reading a broadside. The staff inhabited the long attic that ran the length of the hotel, divided into several rooms, far enough above the garden for the sounds of massed passion to be a little less evident as it filtered up through the one narrow gabled window.

“Not going out, Smith?” she inquired. Her gaze fell on the case he carried, and she looked up at him in sharp inquiry. “Dear, dear, have we had a contretemps of some kind?”

“You said Sharplin Coppercut isn’t a food critic,” said Smith. “What kind of journalist is he, then?”

“He’s a scandalmonger,” Mrs. Smith replied. “Writes a column that runs in all the broadsides. A master of dirty innuendo and shocking revelation. He’s done some unauthorized biographies of assorted famous persons, too, instant best-sellers if I recall correctly. I’ve read one or two. Racy stuff. Mean-spirited, however.”

“He dressed pretty well, for somebody living on a writer’s salary,” said Smith.

“You’re speaking of him in the past tense,” observed Mrs. Smith.

“Well, he’s dead.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” said Mrs. Smith, taking a drag and exhaling smoke. “I assume you mean he’s been murdered?”

“It looks that way.” Smith sagged into a chair.

“Hmph.” Mrs. Smith regarded the scribe’s case. “My guess would be, he blackmailed the wrong person. They do say he made more money being paid not to write, if you understand me. Had a network of spies in every city digging up dirt for him. Did his research, too. It was what made his stuff so entertaining, you see—never indulged in empty insinuation. When that man threw mud, it stuck.”

“Why would he have been writing about the House Spell-metal scandal?” Smith wondered. Mrs. Smith’s eyes widened.

“He was fool enough to blackmail those people? They’re still angry about it, and they’ve got a long reach. How d’you know that was who did for him?”

Smith explained how the body had been found and about the scroll fragments that had survived the fire. “I’ve been trying to remember what the scandal was all about,” he said. “I was working on a long-run freighter back then, and we didn’t put into port much, so I don’t think I ever heard the whole story.”

Mrs. Smith made a face. “I believe it requires a stiff drink, Smith,” she said.

Getting out of bed, she pulled a dressing gown on over her voluminous shift and poured herself an impromptu cocktail from the bottles on her dresser. She poured one for Smith too, and when they were both settled again said, “I’ll tell you as much as I know. It was in all the broadsides at the time; there were ballads, and somebody even attempted to mount a play on the subject, but House Spellmetal had it suppressed with breathtaking speed. D’you remember a self-proclaimed prophet, called himself the Sunborn?”

“Vaguely,” said Smith. “Came to a bad end, didn’t he?”

“Very. That was at the end of the story, however. It all started out in wine and roses, as they used to say. He was a charismatic. Could charm the birds down out of the trees and anyone’s clothes off. Preached deliverance through excess; with him it was Festival all year long, every day. If he’d confined himself to having a good time, he might still be with us.

“Unfortunately, he really believed what he taught.” Mrs. Smith shook her head.

“He was the one House Spellmetal went after,” Smith recalled.

“So he was.”

“And there was a massacre, wasn’t there? Why?”

Mrs. Smith had a long sip of her drink before answering.

“He had a band of followers,” she said at last. “Like any charismatic. One of the things he advocated was free love between the races, so he had quite a mixed bag of people at his, ahem, services. They were driven out of every place they settled in. At last the Sunborn had a vision that he and his lovers were to found a holy city where all might live according to his creed, greenies included.

“And then, somehow or other, the heir to House Spell-metal fell under his influence.”

“That was it,” Smith said. “And the Spellmetals disapproved.”

“Of course they did. The boy was young and thick as two planks, but he adored the Sunborn and he was, of course, rich. So he offered the Sunborn and his followers a huge estate House Spellmetal owned, up near their marble quarries, to be the site of the new holy city. Away they all went and moved into the family mansion there. The boy’s father was beside himself.

“You can guess the rest. House Spellmetal raised an army and went up there to get the boy back and forcibly evict the rest of them, with the exception of the Sunborn, whom they intended to skin alive. They didn’t get him alive, however. They didn’t get anybody alive. There was an armed standoff and finally a massacre.”

Smith shook his head. Mrs. Smith finished her drink.

“I have heard,” she said, “that Konderon Spellmetal strode in through the broken wall and found his son dead in the arms of an equally dead Yendri girl, pierced with one arrow in the very act itself. I’ve heard he swore eternal vengeance on any follower of the Sunborn, and hasn’t thought of another thing since that hour.”

“But they all died,” said Smith.

“Apparently there were a few who fled out through the back, just before the massacre.” Mrs. Smith shrugged and stared into her empty glass before setting it aside. “Women and children, mostly. The Spellmetals had a body they said was the Sunborn’s skinned, but there have always been rumors it wasn’t really him, and he’s supposed to have been sighted over the years here and there. One couple, a man and his wife and baby, went straight to the law and turned themselves in. They weren’t mixed-race, and it turned out they hadn’t really been part of the cult; they’d just been the Sunborn’s cousins or something like that.

“They were acquitted. They hadn’t got five steps out of the Temple of the Law when an assassin hired by House Spellmetal put a pair of bolts right through their hearts. Needless to say, any remaining survivors stayed well underground after that.”

“So they must have fabulous prices on their heads,” Smith mused.

“I imagine so. Konderon Spellmetal’s still alive.”

“So Coppercut might have tracked one of them down and threatened him or her with exposure,” said Smith. “Or he might have been proposing to rake it all up again in a book, against House Spellmetal’s wishes.”

“Occasionally the broadsheets like to do Where-Are-They-Now retrospectives,” said Mrs. Smith.

“But whoever killed him went through his papers and burned anything to do with the scandal,” Smith theorized. “I wonder if they got it all?”

He opened the scribe’s case and drew out those papers that remained inside. Mrs. Smith watched him as he shuffled through them.

“They must have been interrupted before they could finish. Anything of note?”

Smith blinked at the pages. They were notes taken in the hasty backhand, apparently copied from city files, and they appeared to trace adoption records for an infant girl, of the house name Sunbolt. She’d been made a ward of the court of the city of Karkateen. There were brief summaries of depositions from persons involved, and then the note that the venue for the child’s case had been changed to Mount Flame. There, after medical certification that she was likely to grow up into the necessary physical type for such work, the infant had been placed in the Mount Flame Mother House for Runners.

The next few pages were all notes of interviews with various persons, concerning the five young runners who had entered active service in the twelfth year of the reign of Chairman Giltbrand.

The very last page was a list of five names, none of them Sunbolt, with four of them crossed out. The remaining name was underlined. It was Teeba Burnbright.

Under that was written: Present employment: house messenger, Hotel Grandview, 4 Front Street, Salesh-by-the-Sea.

“I didn’t know her first name was Teeba,” said Smith distractedly.

“Burnbright?” Mrs. Smith scowled at him. “What’s she got to do with it?”

Smith waved the handful of papers, thinking hard.

“The first thing he asked when he got here was if he could see our house runner,” he said. “I sent Burnbright up to him as soon as she got back. I haven’t seen her since. Crucible said she’d run off crying about something. Oh, hell—”

“She’s asleep in her room,” Mrs. Smith informed him. “I went into the cellar for some apricot preserves for the Festival Cake, and she was hiding down there, sniveling. She’d opened a bottle of orchid extract and gotten herself into a state of messy intoxication. I gave her a dose of Rattlerail’s Powders and a thorough telling-off, and sent her to bed. Smith, that child’s far too scatterbrained to pull off a murder!”

“But she knows something,” said Smith.

“Well, you’re going to have to wait until morning to question her,” said Mrs. Smith, “with the condition she was in.”

“I guess so.” Smith stuffed the papers back in the scribe’s case and set them aside. Suddenly he felt bone-tired and very old. “All this and Lord Ermenwyr under the roof, too. I’ve had enough of Festival.”

“Two days yet to go of exquisite orgiastic fun,” said Mrs. Smith grimly.

Far too early the next morning, Smith was crouched at his desk in the lobby, warming his hands on a mug of tea. Most of the hotel’s guests were either passed out in their rooms or in the shrubbery, and it would be at least an hour before anyone was likely to ring for breakfast. He had already spotted Burnbright. She was sitting in the deserted bar, deep in quiet conversation with the young Yendri doctor. He was holding both her hands and speaking at length. Smith was only waiting for Willowspear to leave so he could have a word with her in private.

While they were still cloistered together, however, Lord Ermenwyr and his bodyguards came down the staircase.

“Smith.” Lord Ermenwyr looked from side to side and caught his sleeve. “Are you aware you’ve got a … er … deceased person in Room 2?”

“Not anymore,” Smith told him. “We carried him down into the cold storage cellar an hour ago.”

“Oh, good,” said the lordling. “The smell was making the boys restless, and there was a soul raging around in there half the night. Came through my wall at one point and started throwing things about, until I appeared to him in my true form. He turned tail at that, but I was looking forward to a bit of fun tonight and don’t want any apparitions interrupting me. Who was it?”

Smith explained, rubbing his grainy eyes.

“Really!” Lord Ermenwyr looked shocked. “Well, I wish I’d been the one to send him to his deserved reward! Coppercut was a real stinker, you know. No wonder Burnbright’s in need of spiritual comfort.”

“Is that what they’re doing in there?” Smith peered over at the bar.

“She and Willowspear? Of course. He’s a Disciple, you know. Has all the sex drive of a grain of rice, so skittish young ladies in need of a sympathetic shoulder to cry on find him irresistible.” Lord Ermenwyr sneered in the direction of the bar. “Perhaps she’d like a bit of slightly more robust consolation later, do you think? I’ll listen to her problems and give her advice she can use next time she has to kill somebody.”

“You don’t think she did it?” Smith scowled.

“Oh, I suppose not. Say, did you have plans for the body?” Lord Ermenwyr turned back and looked at him hopefully.

“Yes. The City Warden is coming for it after Festival.”

“Damn. In that case, what about sending out for a sheep?” The lordling dug in his purse and dropped a silver piece on the desk. “That ought to take care of it. Just have the porter lead it straight up to my suite. I’m going back to bed now. Would the divine Mrs. Smith be so kind as to send up a tray of tea and clear broth?”

“I’ll see it done, lord,” said Smith, eyeing the silver piece and wondering where he was going to get a live sheep during Festival.

“Thanks. Come along, boys.” Lord Ermenwyr turned on his heel and headed back toward the stairs, with his bodyguards following closely. At the door of the bar he leaned in and yelled: “If you’ve quite finished, Willowspear, I believe my heartbeat’s developing an alarming irregularity. You might want to come along and pray over me or something. Assuming you’ve no objection, Burnbright dearest?”

There was a murmur from the bar, and Willowspear hurried out, looking back over his shoulder. “Remember that mantra, child,” he said, and turned to follow his master up the stairs.

“Burnbright,” Smith called.

A moment later she came through the doorway, reluctant to look at him. Burnbright was in as bad a shape as a young person can be after a night of tears and orchid extract, which was a lot better than Smith himself would have been under the same circumstances. She dug a knuckle into one slightly swollen eye, and asked, “What?”

“What happened, up there with Mr. Coppercut?” Her mouth trembled. She kept her gaze on the floor as she said; “I thought he wanted me to run him a message. He didn’t have any messages. He told me he knew who I really was. Told me all this story about these people who got themselves killed when I was a baby, or something. Said he knew who fostered me out to my mother house. Said I had guilty blood and some big noise House Smeltmetal or somebody would pay a lot of money for my head. Said he could set bounty hunters after me with a snap of his fingers!”

She looked up at Smith in still-simmering outrage. “I told him it was a lot of lies. He said he could prove it, and he said he was going to write about me being one of the survivors, so everybody’d know who I am and where I live. Unless I paid him. And I said I didn’t have any money. And he said that wasn’t what he wanted.”

“Bastard,” said Smith. “And…?

“What d’you think he wanted?” Burnbright clenched her little fists. “And … and he said there were other things he wanted me to do. I got up to run at that, and he couldn’t stop me, but he told me to think it over. He said to come back when I’d calmed down. Said he’d be waiting. So I ran away.”

“You went downstairs to hide?”

“I needed to think,” said Burnbright, blushing. “And Mrs. Smith caught me and gave me what for because I was drinking. So I went upstairs, but I’d been thinking, well, it’s Festival after all and maybe it’s not so wrong. But it seemed awfully unfair, now of all times! But then I thought maybe he’d leave me alone after—and nobody’d ever know if I… well anyway, I went in to see him. But—” She paused, gulped.

“He was dead?”

Burnbright nodded quickly, giving him a furtive look of relief. “Sitting there in the firelight, just like in a ghost story. So I left.”

“You didn’t have anything to do with getting him killed? Didn’t put drain cleaner in his food?” asked Smith, just to have it said and done with. Burnbright shook her head.

“Though that would have been a really good idea,” she admitted. Her eyes widened. “Did somebody do that? Eeeew!! It must have eaten through him like—”

“We don’t know how he died,” said Smith. “I’m trying to find out.”

“Well, it wasn’t me,” Burnbright maintained. “As mean as he was, he probably had lots of enemies. And now he can’t hurt anybody else!” she added brightly.

“Did you touch anything in the room when you were there?”

“Nothing,” Burnbright said. “You’re not supposed to, are you, at a murder scene? There were lots of murders in Mount Flame City; everyone there knows what to do when you stumble on a body. Leave fast and keep your mouth shut!”

“All right. So you haven’t told anybody?”

Burnbright flushed and looked away. “Just that… doctor. Because I… he asked me what was the matter. But he won’t tell. He’s very spiritual.”

“For a greenie, eh?”

“I never met one like him,” said Burnbright earnestly. “And he’s beautiful. Don’t you think? I could just stare at that face for hours.”

“Well, don’t,” Smith told her, too weary to be amused. “Go help the porters cleaning up the terrace.”

“Okay!” Burnbright hurried off. Smith watched her go, pressing his tea mug to the spot on his left temple where his headache was worst. The heat felt good.

He was still sitting like that, mulling over what he’d just learned, when a man came running in from the street.

Smith straightened up and blinked at him suspiciously, not because of the stranger’s precipitate appearance but because he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. There was a blurred quality to the man’s outline, an evanescent play of uncertain colors. For a moment Smith wondered whether Coppercut’s ghost wasn’t on the loose, perhaps objecting to his body being laid out on three blocks of ice between a barrel of pickled oysters and a double flitch of bacon.

But as he neared the desk, stumbling slightly, the stranger seemed to solidify and focus. Tall and slender, he wore nothing but an elaborately worked silver collar and a matching ornament of a sheathlike nature over his loins. It being the middle of Festival, this was nothing to attract attention; but there was something unsettlingly familiar about the young man’s face.

His features were smooth and regular, handsome to the point of prettiness. His hair was thickly curling, and there was a lot of it. His wide eyes were cold, glittering, and utterly mad.

“Hello,” he said, wafting wine fumes at Smith. “I understand this is a, er, friendly hotel. Can I see your thing you write people’s names in?”

His voice was familiar too. Smith peered at him.

“You mean the registration book?”

“Of course,” said the youth, just as three more strangers ran through the doorway and Smith placed the likeness. If Lord Ermenwyr were taller, and clean-shaven, and had more hair, and didn’t squint so much—

“There he is!” roared one of the men.

“Die, cheating filth!” roared another.

“Vengeance!” roared the third.

The youth said something unprintable and vanished. Smith found himself holding two mugs of tea.

The three men halted in their advance across the lobby.

“He’s done it again!” said the first stranger.

“There he is!” The second pointed at the tea mug in Smith’s left hand.

“Vengeance!” repeated the third man, and they resumed their headlong rush. But they were now rushing at Smith.

They were unaware of Smith’s past, however, or his particular talent, and so, ten seconds later, they were all dead.

One had Smith’s left boot knife embedded in his right eye to the hilt. One had Smith’s right boot knife embedded in his left eye, also to the hilt. The third had Smith’s tea mug protruding from a depression in his forehead. Looking very surprised, they stood swaying a moment before tottering backward and collapsing on the lobby carpet. No less surprised, Smith groaned and, getting to his feet, came around the side of the desk to examine the bodies. Quite dead.

“That was amazing! Thanks,” said the youth, who had reappeared beside him.

Smith’s headache was very bad by then, and for a moment the pounding was so loud he thought he might be having a stroke; but it was only the thunder of eight feet in iron-soled boots descending the stairs, and behind them the rapid patter of two feet more elegantly shod.

“Master!” shouted Lord Ermenwyr’s bodyguards, prostrating themselves at the youth’s feet.

“Forgive us our slowness!” implored Cutt.

“What in the Nine Hells are you doing here?” hissed Lord Ermenwyr furiously, staring at the youth as though his eyes were about to leap right out of his head.

“Hiding,” said the youth, beginning to grin.

“Well, you can’t hide here, because I’m hiding here, so go away!” said Lord Ermenwyr, stamping his feet in his agitation. Willowspear, who had come up silently behind him, stared at the newcomer in amazement.

“My lord! Are you unhurt?” he asked.

The youth ignored him, widening his grin at Lord Ermenwyr. “Ooo! Is the baby throwing a tantrum? Is the poor little stoat scared he’s going to be dug out of his hole? Here comes the scary monster to catch him!”

“Stop it!” Lord Ermenwyr screamed, as the youth shambled toward him giggling, and as the youth’s graceful form began to run and alter into a horrible-looking melting mess. “You idiot, we’re in a city! There are people around!”

Smith drew a deep breath and leaped forward, grabbing the thing that had been a youth around its neck and doing his best to get it in a chokehold. To his amazement, Curt, Crish, Stabb, and Strangel were instantly on their feet, snarling at him, and Willowspear had seized his arm with surprisingly strong hands.

“No! No! Smith, stop!” cried Lord Ermenwyr.

“Then … this isn’t the mage Blichbiss?” Smith inquired, as the thing in his grip oozed unpleasantly.

“Who?” bubbled the thing.

“This is the Lord Eyrdway,” Willowspear explained. “The Variable Magnificent, firstborn of the Unwearied Mother, heir to the Black Halls.”

“He’s my damned brother,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “You’d better let him go, Smith.”

Smith let go. “A thousand apologies, my lord,” he said cautiously.

“Oh, that’s all right,” gurgled the thing, re-forming itself into the handsome youth. “You did just save my life, after all.”

This brought Smith’s attention back to the three dead men lying in front of the desk. Lord Ermenwyr followed his gaze.

“Dear, dear, and I promised you there wouldn’t be any bodies lying around your nice hotel, didn’t I? Boys, let’s get rid of the evidence. Who were they?” He turned a gimlet eye on Lord Eyrdway, as the bodyguards moved at once to gather up the dead. They carried them quickly up the stairs, chuckling amongst themselves.

“Who were they? Just some people,” said Lord Eyrdway, a little uncomfortably. “Can I have a drink?”

“What do you mean, ‘just some people’?” demanded Lord Ermenwyr.

“Just some people I… cheated, and sort of insulted their mothers,” said Lord Eyrdway. “And killed one of their brothers. Or cousins. Or something.” His gaze slid sideways to Smith. “Hey, mortal man, want to see something funny?”

He lunged forward and grabbed Lord Ermenwyr’s beard, and gave it a mighty yank.

“Ow!” Lord Ermenwyr struck his hand away and danced back. Lord Eyrdway looked confused.

“It’s a real beard now, you cretin!” Lord Ermenwyr said, rubbing his chin.

“Oh.” Lord Eyrdway was nonplussed for a moment before turning to Smith. “See, he’s got this ugly baby face and he was worried he’d never grow a real mage’s beard like Daddy’s, so he—”

“Shut up!” raged Lord Ermenwyr.

“Or maybe it was to hide his pimples,” Lord Eyrdway continued gloatingly, at which Lord Ermenwyr sprang forward and grabbed him by the throat. Willowspear and Smith managed to pry them apart, and managed only because Lord Eyrdway had made a ridge of thorns project out of the sinews of his neck, causing his brother to pull back with a yelp of pain. He stood back, nursing his hands and glaring at Lord Eyrdway.

“Those had better not be venomous,” he said.

“Curl up and die, shorty,” Lord Eyrdway told him cheerfully. He looked around. “Is there a bar in here?”

“Maybe we should all go upstairs, lord?” Smith suggested.

“Er—no,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “I don’t think you want to go into my rooms for the next little while.” He looked at the entrance to the bar. “It’s private in there.”

It would be hours yet before Rivet came in to work, so Willowspear obligingly went behind the bar and fetched out a couple of bottles of wine and glasses for them.

“Is anybody else likely to come bursting in here in pursuit of you?” Lord Ermenwyr inquired irritably, accepting a glass of wine from Willowspear.

“I don’t think so,” said Lord Eyrdway. “I’m pretty sure I scared off the rest of them when I turned into a giant wolf a few streets back. You should have seen me! Eyes shooting fire, fangs as long as your arm—”

“Oh, save it. I’m not impressed.”

“Are you a mage also, lord?” Smith inquired, before they could come to blows again.

“Me, a mage?” Lord Eyrdway looked scornful. “Gods, no. I don’t need to do magic. I am magic.” He drained his wine at a gulp and held out his glass to be refilled. “More, Willowspear. What are you doing down here, anyway?”

“Attending on your lord brother,” Willowspear replied, bowing and refilling his glass. “And—”

“That’s right, because Nursie’s busy with the new brat!” Lord Eyrdway grinned again. “So poor little Wormenwyr needs somebody else to start up his heart when it stops beating. Did you know my brother is practically one of the undead, mortal? What was your name?”

“Smith, lord.”

“The good Smith knows all about me,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “But I never told him about you.”

“Oh, you must have heard of me!” Lord Eyrdway looked at Smith in real surprise.

“Well—”

“Hear, mortal, the lamentable tragedy of my house,” Lord Ermenwyr intoned gloomily. “For it came to pass that the dread Master of the Mountain, in all his inky and infernal glory, did capture a celestial Saint to be his bride, under the foolish impression he was insulting Heaven thereby. But, lo! Scarce had he clasped her in his big evil arms when waves of radiant benignity and divine something-or-other suffused his demonic nastiness, permanently reforming him; for, as he was later to discover to his dismay, the Compassionate One had actually let him capture her with that very goal in mind. But that’s the power of Love, isn’t it? It never plays fair.

“And, in the first earthshaking union of their marital bliss, so violent and so acute was the discord across the planes that a hideous cosmic mistake was made, and forth through the Gates of Life issued a concentrated gob of Chaos, and nine months later it sort of oozed out of Mother and assumed the shape of a baby.”

“My lord!” Willowspear looked anguished. “You blaspheme!”

“Stuff it,” Lord Eyrdway told his brother. “It’s all lies, mortal. Smith? Yes. I was a beautiful baby, Mother’s always said so. And I could change shape when I was still in the cradle, unlike you, you miserable little vampire. You know how he came into the world, Smith?”

“Shut up!” Lord Ermenwyr shouted.

“Ha, ha—it seems Mother and Daddy were making love in a hammock in a gazebo in the garden, and because they were neither on the earth, nor in the sky, nor under earth or in the sea, nor indoors nor out, but suspended—”

“Don’t tell that story!”

“I forget exactly what went wrong, but seven months later, Mother noticed this wretched screaming little thing that had fallen out under her skirt, and she had pity on it, even though I told her she ought to give it away because we didn’t need any more babies, but I guess being the Compassionate One she had to keep it, and unfortunately it grew up, though it never got very big.” Lord Eyrdway smiled serenely at his brother.

“You pus-bucket,” Lord Ermenwyr growled.

“Midget.”

“Imbecile!”

“Dwarf.”

“You big walking string of shapeless snot from the nose of a diseased—”

“I know you are, but what am I?”

“You—!” Lord Ermenwyr was on the point of launching himself across the table at his brother when Smith rose in his seat, and thundered, “Shut up, both of you!”

The brothers sat back abruptly and stared at him, shocked.

“You can’t tell us to shut up,” said Lord Eyrdway in wonderment. “We’re demons.”

“Quarter demons,” Willowspear corrected him.

“But I killed three men for you, so you owe me,” said Smith. “Don’t you? No more fighting as long as you’re both here.”

“Whatever you like,” said Lord Eyrdway amiably enough, taking a sip of his wine. “I always honor a debt of blood.”

“I still want to know what you’re doing off the mountain,” said Lord Ermenwyr sullenly. “To say nothing of why you chose to bolt into my favorite hotel.”

“Oh,” said Eyrdway, looking uneasy. “That. Well, I made a little mistake. It wasn’t my fault.”

“Really?” Lord Ermenwyr smiled at him, narrowing his eyes. “Whatever did you do, might one ask?”

“I just raided a caravan,” said Lord Eyrdway.

“Hmmm. And?” Lord Ermenwyr’s smile showed a few sharp teeth.

“Well—you know, when caravans are insured, they really ought to be required to carry signs or something saying who insured them, so everybody will know,” said Lord Eyrdway self-righteously.

Lord Ermenwyr began to snicker.

“You raided a caravan that was insured by Daddy’s company,” he stated gleefully. “And Daddy had to pay the claim?”

“Your father runs an insurance company?” Smith inquired.

“And makes a lot more money than by being a brigand,” Lord Ermenwyr replied. “There are only so many ways you can keep your self-respect as a Lord of Evil when you can’t break any laws.”

“And there wasn’t even any nice loot,” complained Lord Eyrdway. “Nothing but a lot of stupid bags of flour. So I cut them all open in case there was anything valuable inside, which there wasn’t, so we just threw the stuff around and danced in it and came home white as ghosts, and then it turned out the flour had been going to a village where the people were starving, so that got Mother mad at me too.”

“You sublime blockhead!” Lord Ermenwyr rocked to and fro, hugging himself.

“So Daddy told me I was banished until I could repay him the value of the caravan,” said Lord Eyrdway. “And Mother reproached me.”

“Ooh.” Lord Ermenwyr winced. “That’s serious. And you haven’t a clue how to get money, have you?”

“I do so!” snarled Lord Eyrdway. “I stole some from a traveler when I was coming down the mountain. But he didn’t have nearly enough, so I asked the next traveler I robbed where there was a good gambling house, and he said there were a lot of them in Salesh-by-the-Sea.”

“Oh, gods.”

“Well, you’re always on about how much fun you have here! So I got over the city wall and found a nice gambling house, and at first I won lots of money,” Lord Eyrdway said. “And they served me a lot of free drinks. So I drank a little more than I should have, maybe. So some of what happened I don’t remember too well. But there was a lot of shouting.”

“You must have killed somebody,” said Smith.

“Yes, I think I did,” Lord Eyrdway agreed. “Not only did I not win any more money, they wanted money from me! And so I left, and changed into a few things to throw them off the chase. But they figured out I was changing, somehow, and kept after me. So I ran down to the harbor and turned myself into a seagull. Wasn’t that clever of me?” He turned to his brother, bright-eyed. “Nobody can pick one seagull out of a crowd!”

“You’re brilliant,” drawled Lord Ermenwyr. “Go on.”

“So I spent the night like that, and all the lady seagulls fell in love with me. But I was thirsty by this morning, so I turned back into me and went walking along the harbor looking for a place to get a drink. Then I heard a yell, and when I turned around, there were those people again, and they had other people with them, and they were all coming after me with weapons drawn.”

“You booby, they’d had time to circulate your description,” Lord Ermenwyr told him.

“Really?” Lord Eyrdway looked dismayed. “What are they so upset about? I thought nothing was forbidden in Salesh in Festival time.”

“They’re talking about sins of the flesh, not manslaughter,” Smith pointed out.

“Oh. Well, it ought to say so on those brochures, then! Anyway I remembered you had a safe house somewhere hereabouts, so I went looking for it, but—”

“You were coming to me for protection?” Lord Ermenwyr smiled, showing all his teeth.

“No, I wasn’t!” said Lord Eyrdway at once. “I don’t need your protection! I just thought, you know…” He opened and shut his mouth a few times, seeking words.

“Well, that’s done it; his brain’s seized up with the effort,” Lord Ermenwyr said to Smith. “While we’re waiting, let me apologize for this unsightly complication. As for you, brother dearest, I shall be happy to offer you refuge. It’s what Mother would want me to do, I’m sure.”

“Go explode yourself,” said Lord Eyrdway pettishly. “I just thought I could borrow enough money from you to pay Daddy back.”

“Ah, but then you’d miss the instructive discipline Daddy was meting out by your temporary banishment, wouldn’t you?” said Lord Ermenwyr. “And I’m certain Mother was hoping you’d learn some sort of moral lesson from the experience, as well.”

“Does that mean you won’t lend me the money?”

“You fool, it’s ridiculously easy to get money from mortals without stealing it from them,” Lord Ermenwyr said.

“It is?” Large brass wheels and gears appeared in the air above Lord Eyrdway’s head, turning slowly. “People do that, don’t they?”

“Quite. For example, Smith, here, used to kill people for money,” said Lord Ermenwyr.

“Used to,” Smith said. “I keep a hotel now. I don’t recommend the assassin game, lord. It’s a lot harder than it sounds.”

“Well, I don’t want to do anything hard,” said Lord Eyrdway, frowning. The gears above his head metamorphosed into a glowing lamp, and he turned to his brother. “I know! Haven’t you been peddling your ass to the mortals?”

“I’m a junior gigolo,” Lord Ermenwyr corrected him. “And it’s much more subtle than mere peddling. You have to romance them. You have to wheedle presents. You have to know the best places to unload presents for cash. But, yes, you can get mortals to pay you ever so much for having sex with them, if you’re young and beautiful.”

“How’d you manage it, then?” Lord Eyrdway chortled.

“Smith, shall I tell you about the time Eyrdway here was beaten up by our sister?”

“Don’t tell him that story!”

“Then watch your mouth, you oaf. A male prostitute has to be charming.” Lord Ermenwyr stroked his beard and considered his brother through half-closed eyes. “There are certain streets where one goes to linger. You make yourself look young and vulnerable, and I always found it helped to let a little of my glamour down, so mortals could just get the tiniest glimpse of my true form.”

“I can do that,” Lord Eyrdway decided.

“Then you wait for someone to notice you. You want somebody older, somebody well dressed. Usually they offer to buy you a drink.”

“Got it.”

“And then you go to bed with them and make them as happy as you possibly can. The customer is always right, remember.”

“Are you sure this is what you used to do?” Lord Eyrdway looked dubious as he ran back over the details.

“Why, of course,” said Lord Ermenwyr silkily. He had a sip of his wine.

“And you can really get money this way?”

“Heaps,” Lord Ermenwyr assured his brother.

“Well, then, I ought to be a famous success!” said Lord Eyrdway happily. “Because I’m lots more attractive than you. I think I’ll start today.”

“You won’t get anybody to pay for sex during Festival,” said Smith.

“That’s true,” Lord Ermenwyr agreed. “You’ll have to start next week. You can stay with me until then. You can’t practice here in Smith’s hotel, because he’s having a bit of trouble already. But there are public orgies scheduled all over town tonight.” He looked his brother up and down. “I’d recommend going in a different shape. You’re still wanted by the City Wardens, remember.”

“Right,” said Lord Eyrdway. “Thanks.”

“What are brothers for?” said Lord Ermenwyr.

“Bail,” said Lord Eyrdway. He looked curiously at Smith. “You’re having trouble? Anything I can help with? You did save my life, after all.”

Smith explained the circumstances, so far as he knew them, surrounding the murder of Sharplin Coppercut.

“Well, if things turn nasty, I’ll let little Burnbright hide in my room until she can be smuggled out,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “Is she really one of the massacre survivors?”

“Coppercut thought so,” said Smith. “And he’d gone to a lot of trouble to dig up evidence. But she can’t have been much more than a newborn when it all happened.”

“Mother took in somebody’s orphan from the Spellmetal thing, didn’t she?” said Lord Eyrdway. He pointed at Willowspear. “In fact, it was you, wasn’t it?”

Lord Ermenwyr grimaced. Smith looked at Willowspear.

“Is that true?”

“You’ve just implicated him, you moron,” Lord Ermenwyr told his brother.

“Yes, sir, it’s true,” Willowspear replied. “I lost my parents in the massacre.”

“But he can’t kill anybody, Smith,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “He’s one of Mother’s disciples. They don’t do that kind of thing.”

“He was on the same floor as Coppercut at the time the murder happened,” Smith explained patiently. “He’s connected to the Spellmetal massacre. He’s a doctor, so he knows herbs and presumably poisons. Wasn’t he in the kitchen at one point? When he fixed up Burnbright’s knee? And he was standing behind your chair on the balcony during the fireworks display; I saw him. He might have slipped away without you noticing.”

“Smith, I give you my word as my father’s son—” protested Lord Ermenwyr.

“What about it?” Smith asked Willowspear. “Coppercut was a damned bad man. He was using his knowledge to hurt innocents. A lot of people would have considered it a moral act to take him out. Did you?”

“No,” said Willowspear. “As a servant of the Compassionate One, I may not judge others, nor may I kill.”

“Coppercut couldn’t have had anything on him, anyway,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “No records to trace. Yendri adoptions aren’t done through your courts.”

“Somebody in rags showed up one day at the front battlement, carrying a baby,” Lord Eyrdway affirmed. “Which was you, Willowspear. Mother took the baby in, the beggar went away. End of story.”

“It’s a coincidence,” stated Lord Ermenwyr. “It could have been anybody here.”

Smith nodded, not taking his eyes from Willowspear’s face. The young man met his gaze unflinchingly. “I’ll interview the guests, then, as they become conscious.”

Lord Eyrdway remembered his drink and emptied it in a gulp. “By the way, Ermenwyr, somebody else came round to the front gate asking for you. Just before Daddy threw me out.”

“What?” Lord Ermenwyr started. “Who?”

“Said his name was … oh! That funny name you said.” Lord Eyrdway gestured at Smith. “Bitchbliss?”

“Blichbiss!”

“Whatever. The gate guards told him you’d gone abroad and weren’t expected back for a while. You’d better get in touch with him.”

“I’m not about to get in touch with him!” said Lord Ermenwyr, and explained why. Eyrdway listened, puzzled at first, then frowning.

When his brother had finished, he said, “You mean this man wants to challenge you, and you’re ducking him?”

“Of course I’m ducking him, you half-wit!”

“What are you, a coward?” Lord Eyrdway looked outraged.

“Yes! And if you’d died as often as I have, you’d be a coward too!” said Lord Ermenwyr.

“But you can’t refuse a challenge,” said Lord Eyrdway. “What about the honor of our house?”

“Honor? Hello! Eyrdway, are you in there? Remember who Daddy is?” Lord Ermenwyr yelled in exasperation. “And anyway, you ran like a rabbit yourself when those mortals were after you.”

“Oh, that. Well, they were nobodies, weren’t they? Just some people who wanted to kill me, for some reason. But you have to accept a challenge,” said Lord Eyrdway reasonably.

“No, I don’t, and I won’t,” announced Lord Ermenwyr, tugging at his beard. Hands trembling with vexation, he drew out his smoking tube and packed it full of weed from a small pouch. “Look at me, look what you’ve done to my nerves!”

“Poor baby,” jeered Lord Eyrdway, and then his manner changed. “Oo. Is that pinkweed? Can I have a hit?”

“No.” Lord Ermenwyr lit the tube with a small fireball.

“Not in here!” Smith cautioned.

“Sorry.” Lord Ermenwyr ostentatiously pantomimed waving out a nonexistent straw and setting it down, as he puffed out aromatic fumes in a thick cloud. “I’m going to go upstairs now and have my breakfast, which I never got because you arrived right in the middle of it, and if you promise not to bring a certain subject up again, I’ll share some of this.”

“What subject?” asked Lord Eyrdway.

“Oh, and Smith?” Lord Ermenwyr stood and edged out of the booth. “The sheep won’t be necessary.”

The first of the hotel guests to appear, wandering in with a bewildered expression from the shrubbery, was Lady Shanriana of House Goldspur. She had lost several rather necessary sequins and her blue body paint needed strategic touching up.

Smith hastened forward with a complimentary robe and wrapped it around her, inquiring, “Lady, will you be pleased to take breakfast in the room or in the indoor dining area?”

“In my room, I suppose,” she said. “I’m not sure I recall checking in here last night. Did I have servants with me?”

“No, lady, you came alone.” Smith escorted her up the stairs, for she was wobbling slightly as she walked. “You’re in Room 3. May I suggest hot tea and a sweet roll?”

“Three or four of them,” she replied. “And send someone up to draw me a hot bath. Someone handsome.”

“We’ll send our most attractive porter, madam,” said Smith, mentally noting that New Smith was slightly less weather-beaten than his fellow porters. “Though all our porters are more noted for their strength than their handsomeness, I must warn you.”

“Hmm.” Lady Shanriana dimpled in several locations. “Strength is nice. I like strength.”

“I hope you weren’t disturbed at any time last night,” Smith went on. “We had a mild vendetta problem, it appears.”

“Oh, well, that happens,” said Lady Shanriana, waving a dismissive hand as she wandered past Room 3. Smith, on pretext of leaning close to whisper in her ear, caught her shoulder and steered her gently back around to her door.

“But it’s rather a scandal, I’m afraid, though of course they do say a scandal is good for business,” Smith murmured, watching Lady Shanriana’s face. A gleam of avid interest came into her eyes.

“Who got killed?” she inquired.

“Well—I’ve been asked to keep it quiet, but—” Smith leaned closer still. “It was Sharplin Coppercut, the writer.”

He watched her face closely. The gleam vanished at once, to be followed by a look of disappointment and chagrin. “Oh, no, really? I never missed his columns! He did that wonderfully steamy unauthorized biography of Lady What’s-her-name, the shipping heiress, didn’t he? The Imaginary Virgin? Oh, how awful!”

“Was he a personal acquaintance of yours?”

“Heavens, no. One doesn’t associate with writers,” said Lady Shanriana, looking even more dismayed. She fumbled with the latch on her door. Smith opened it for her and bowed her in.

“On the other hand, once the news is made public, you’ll be able to tell people you had the room across from the one Sharplin Coppercut was in when he died,” Smith pointed out. She seemed distinctly pleased at that. “I hope you weren’t inconvenienced when it happened?”

“No; I was out on the terrace all night. At least, I think I was. Yes, I’m sure I must have been, because there was a whole party of officers from somebody’s war galleon, and they all claimed me because they serve the Spirit of the Waters, don’t they, you see? So we had a lovely time all evening. I must have missed the killing. I suppose it was a dreadfully bloody affair? Assassins all in black leather, hooded?” Her eyes glazed with a private fantasy.

“Something like that,” Smith said.

“Ooh. Send up that porter quickly, please. And a plate of sausage.” Lady Shanriana rubbed her hands together.

Descending the staircase, Smith crossed her off his mental list of suspects. In his previous line of work, he had developed the knack of reading people’s expressions fairly well. Lady Shanriana might have a kink for bloodshed, but she had been genuinely startled to hear of Coppercut’s death.

He caught New Smith in the lobby and gave him Lady Shanriana’s breakfast order, just as a naval officer came stumbling in from the terrace, struggling into his tunic.

“What time is it?” he demanded wildly, as his face emerged from the collar.

“First Prayer Interval was an hour ago,” Smith told him. He calmed down somewhat.

“Where’s the nearest bathhouse?” he inquired. “I’ve got blue stuff all over me.”

“The Spirit of the Waters…?” Smith prompted him, mentally adding the word alibi next to Lady Shanriana’s name.

“Oh! That’s right.” The officer grinned as memory returned to him. “Gods! She started with the midshipmen at sundown and worked her way through to the admiral by midnight. Drowned us all. Joyous couplings! Great food here, too.”

“We get a lot of celebrity clientele,” Smith said. “Sharplin Coppercut, for example.”

“Who’s that?” The officer dug a sequin out of an unlikely place.

“The writer.”

“Really? Never heard of him. Say, did I ask you where there was a bathhouse?”

“There’s one around the corner on Cable Street,” Smith said. “Joyous couplings.”

“You too,” said the officer, striding across the lobby. At the door he turned back, a look of inquiry on his face.

“It has a prophylaxis station, also,” Smith assured him. Beaming, he saluted and left.

In the course of the next hour, Smith worked his way through the surviving hotel guests as they became conscious. The occupants of Room 4 were an elderly married couple from Port Blackrock who were in their room all evening, except for a foray onto the balcony to watch the fireworks. They had only vaguely heard of Sharplin Coppercut, being under the impression he was somebody who’d run for dictator of their city three terms ago, or was it four? They bickered about whether it was three or four terms ago for several minutes, until abruptly deciding they were both wrong and that Sharplin Coppercut had been the name of their grandson’s first rhetoric tutor, the one who’d had such bad teeth.

“You didn’t happen to hear anything unusual last night, did you?” Smith inquired, whereupon they got into a debate over what could be considered unusual in a hotel like this at Festival, with a lengthy reminiscence on how Festival had been celebrated in the old days, followed by a rumination on hotels both general and specific. Half an hour later, Smith thanked them and left. He was fairly confident they were not Coppercut’s killers.

The occupant of Room 5 was a thickset, sullen businessman who had to be retrieved from under a table on the terrace and revived with a dose of hangover powders. He was profoundly surly even after the powders had taken effect, was missing his purse and sandals and threatened to beat Smith to a pulp if they’d been stolen, and was barely more gracious when Crucible located them safely tucked away under the chair he’d been sitting in the night previous. He ostentatiously checked the contents of the purse, threatening to fracture Crucible’s jaw if anything had gone missing.

When it proved that nothing had been stolen, he ordered breakfast and threatened to break Smith’s legs if it wasn’t delivered to his room in fifteen minutes.

Not the sort of man to employ poison as a means of killing someone.

Returning down the corridor, Smith saw pink smoke curling out from under the door of Lord Ermenwyr’s suite and heard terrifying laughter coming from the room beyond. Shuddering, he walked on and went back to the kitchen.

“…much more digestible,” Mrs. Smith was saying as he walked in. She and Burnbright were bending over another sea dragon, but this one was a dessert with a fruit bombe forming its body and a curved neck and head of marzipan. Lined up on trays on the table were row upon row of sugar scales, like disks of green glass, and Mrs. Smith was carefully applying them to the sea dragon’s back with a pair of kitchen tweezers.

“Hello, Smith,” she said, glancing up at him. “Any progress?”

“Some,” said Smith. He pulled out a kitchen stool and sat down, staring glumly at the sea dragon. “This is our entry for the Festival cooking contest?”

“The Pageant of Lascivious Cuisine for the Prolongation of Ecstasy’,” Mrs. Smith informed him. “I’ve got a good chance of winning, or so my spies tell me. The chef over at the Sea Garden failed to get in a special shipment of liqueurs he was counting on, and the chef at the spa’s entry is simply an immense jam roll frosted to look like a penis. Ought to be quite a subliminal qualm of horror amongst the judges when it’s sliced up and served out, wouldn’t you think?”

“Yes,” said Smith, wincing and crossing his legs.

“We’ll do the wings next,” Mrs. Smith told Burnbright. “Melon sugar, pomegranate dye, and rum, boiled to a hard syrup the same way. I’ll show you the shapes I want it cut once it’s cooled. How’s our little mystery going?” she inquired of Smith.

“None of the other guests did the murder,” said Smith, rubbing his temples.

“It still wasn’t me,” said Burnbright, clouding up.

“Silly child, nobody ever thought it was you for a minute. You know, Smith, anyone might have wandered in from the street and done for Coppercut, in all that pullulating frenzy of lust going on last night,” Mrs. Smith remarked, setting scales in a ring around the dragon’s eye. “And it’s not as though there’s any shortage of people with motives. After the way he told all about the scandalous lives of the well-to-do? Especially Lady Quartzhammer, who, as I believe, was depicted in the best-selling The Imaginary Virgin as having a passionate affair with a dwarf.”

“And a bunch of goats,” added Burnbright, stirring pomegranate dye into sugar syrup.

“Something dreadfully unsavory, in any case. To say nothing of the expose he did on House Steelsmoke! I shouldn’t think they particularly cared to have it known that Lord Pankin’s mother was also his sister, and a werewolf into the bargain.” Mrs. Smith turned the sea dragon carefully and started another row of scales.

“Didn’t he say that all the Steelsmoke girls are born with tails, too? That was what I heard!” said Burnbright.

“He interviewed the doctor who did the postnatal amputations,” Mrs. Smith said. “Thoroughly ruthless, Sharplin Coppercut, and ruthlessly thorough. When his demise is made public, I imagine a number of highborn people will drink the health of his murderer in sparkling wine.”

“But he went after lowborn people too,” Burnbright quavered.

“Quite so. It seems unlikely you’ll solve this, Smith.”

Mrs. Smith leaned back and lit her smoking tube. She blew twin jets of smoke from her nostrils and considered him. “Perhaps Crossbrace could be persuaded with a bribe, instead of a likely suspect? Unlimited access to the bar? Or I’d be happy to cater a private supper for him.”

“It all depends on how—” Smith looked up as he heard a cautious knock at the kitchen door.

“Come in,” said Mrs. Smith.

Willowspear entered the kitchen and stopped, seeing Smith. “I beg your pardon,” he said, a little hoarsely. His eyes were watering and inflamed.

“Was the pinkweed getting to you?” Smith inquired.

Willowspear nodded, coughing into his fist. Burnbright, who had spun about the moment she heard his voice, came at once to his side.

“Would you like to sit down?” she asked, in a tone of concern Smith had never heard her use. “Can I get you a cup of water?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Willowspear. Smith and Mrs. Smith exchanged glances.

“Are their lordships getting along?” Smith inquired.

“Reasonably well,” Willowspear replied, sinking onto the stool Burnbright brought for him. “My lord Ermenwyr is reclining on his bed, tossing fireballs into the hearth. My lord Eyrdway is reclining on a couch and has transformed himself into a small fishing boat, complete with oars. They are past speech at the present time, and so are unlikely to quarrel, but are still in fair control of their nervous systems. Thank you, child.” He accepted a cup of water from Burnbright, smiling at her.

“You’re awfully welcome,” said Burnbright, continuing to hover by him.

“It’s very kind of you,” he said.

“Not at all!” she chirped anxiously. “I just—I mean—you’re not like them. I mean, you looked like you needed—er—”

“A drink of water?” prompted Mrs. Smith.

“That’s right,” said Burnbright.

“I did,” said Willowspear. He took a careful sip. “I’m not accustomed to pinkweed smoke in such concentration. I don’t indulge in it, myself.”

“Well, but it’s full of nasty fumes in here!” said Burnbright, pointing at Mrs. Smith’s smoking tube.

“Nothing but harmless amberleaf,” said Mrs. Smith in mild affront. Burnbright ignored her.

“Would you like to step out in our back area until you feel better?” she asked Willowspear. “There’s lovely fresh air, and—and a really nice view!”

“Perhaps I—”

“Would you like me to show you?”

They stared into each other’s eyes for a moment.

“I—yes,” said Willowspear, and Burnbright led him out the back door.

Mrs. Smith blew a smoke ring.

“Well, well,” she remarked.

“I didn’t think she had a sex drive,” said Smith wonderingly.

“It’s Festival, Smith,” Mrs. Smith replied.

“I guess she had to fall in love sooner or later,” said Smith. “I just never thought it’d be with a Yendri.”

Mrs. Smith shrugged.

“They taught her to despise greenies at the mother house, from the time she was old enough to stagger around on her little legs. That would only make the attraction more powerful, once it hit,” she said. “The thrill of the forbidden, and all that.”

She paused a long moment, her gaze unreadable, and took another drag on her smoking tube. “Besides,” she added, exhaling smoke, “it’s in her blood.”

At that moment a small pan on the hearth hissed as its contents foamed up, and Mrs. Smith leaped to her feet. “Hell! She’s gone and left that syrup on the fire!” Muttering imprecations, she snatched it off and dumped its molten contents on the marble countertop, where the red stuff ran and spread like a sheet of gore.

“What on earth?” Smith scrambled to his feet, staring.

“It’s the candy glass for the dragon’s wings,” Mrs. Smith explained, glaring at the door through which Burnbright and Willowspear had disappeared. “Grab a spatula and help me. If we don’t pull this mess into wing shapes before it hardens, it’ll be wasted. Gods and goddesses, I could wring that child’s neck sometimes!”

Smith, being a wise man, grabbed a spatula.

By that afternoon, Smith was too busy to continue his investigation.

Salesh had stretched on her silken couch and awakened once again, blinking through wine-fogged eyes at her lover Festival. After a brief moment of confusion and search for headache remedies, she had recollected who he was and taken him back into her insatiable embrace with renewed vigor.

The solemn bells for Third Prayer Interval signaled the start of the grand Parade of Joyous Couplings along Front Street. Its staging area was just around the corner on Hawser, so guests at the Hotel Grandview had a fine view of the proceedings.

With a shrill wail of pipes, with a chime and rattle of tambourines, here came the first of the revelers, clad in a shower of rose petals and very little else! They danced, they tossed their wild hair, they bounded athletically for the edification of the assembled crowd along the street’s edge. Winsome girls rode the shoulders of bull-mighty boys, and from small baskets the girls tossed aphrodisiac comfits to onlookers.

Behind them, a team of men costumed as angels towed a wide flat wagon. Riding in it were some two dozen nurses who bore in their arms the bounty of last year’s Festival, pretty three-month-olds decked in flowers. The babies stared around in bewilderment, or wept at all the noise, or slept in sublime indifference to the passion that had created them.

Following after, likewise crowned in flowers, were scores of little children born of previous Festivals, marching unevenly behind the foremost, who carried a long banner between them reading: LOVE MADE US. They trotted doggedly along, pushing back wreaths that slipped over their eyes. They stared uncertainly into the sea of adult faces, searching for their mothers, or waved as they had been told, or held hands with other children and laboriously performed the dance steps they had been taught for this occasion.

Next came the Salesh Festival Orchestra, blaring with enthusiasm a medley that began with “Burnished Beard on My Pillow,” continued into “The Lady Who Could Do It Thirty Times Without Stopping” and concluded with a rousing arrangement of “The Virgins of Karkateen.” After them came the parade floats sponsored by the different businesses and guilds of Salesh.

Here, steering badly as it lumbered along, for all that it was driven with ingenious gear ratios by its clockwork rowers, was a thirty-foot gilded galley bearing the Spirit of Love, in her scarlet silks. Her breasts were the size of harbor buoys, and puppeteers worked her immense languid hands as she blessed the crowd.

Here was a float presenting the Mother of Fire in her garden, a towering lady wreathed in red and yellow scarves, which were kept in constant motion by concealed technicians working a series of bellows under the float. Their scrambling legs were just visible under the skirts of the pageant wagon, and now and then a hand would flash into view as it tossed a fistful of incense onto one of the several braziers that were housed in giant roses of flame-colored enameled tin.

Here was a float representing the Father Blacksmith, presented at the Anvil of the World, his sea-colored eyes great disks of inset glass with lanterns behind them, and his left arm articulated on a ratcheting wheel cranked by a technician who crouched under his elbow, so that it rose and fell, rose and fell with its great hammer, beating out the fate of all men, and more incense smoke streamed upward from his forge.

After his wagon came a dozen clowns dressed as phalluses, running to and fro on tiny spindly legs and peering desperately through tiny eyeholes as they tried to avoid falling over one another. They were great favorites with the little children in the audience.

Next came rolling a half-sized replica of the famous war galley Duke Rakut’s Pride, its decks crowded with sailors and mermaids, waving cheerfully at the crowd despite their various amatory entanglements. Halfway down the block between Hawser and Cable its topmast became entangled in an advertising banner stretched across Front Street at roof level, and the parade had to be halted long enough for a sailor to disengage, scramble up the mast with his knife, and cut the banner’s line, for which he received cheers and applause.

After that, more musicians: the Runners’ Trumpeting Corps, long-legged girls resplendent in their red uniforms and flaring scarves, lifting curiously worked horns to blare the Salesh Fanfare with brazen throats. Behind them came the drummers of the Porters’ Union, thundering mightily on steel drums with their fists, so that the din rolled and echoed between the housefronts for blocks. And after them, a contingent from the Anchor Street Bakery came pulling a giant cake on wheels, from the top of which children costumed as cherubs threw sweet rolls to the crowd.

Male jugglers marched after, miraculously keeping suggestively painted clubs in the air without stopping their forward momentum, though each bore a female acrobat with her legs twined about his waist in mimicked intimate union. The girls occasionally leaned far backward and walked with their hands, or juggled small brass balls.

More floats, more Spirits of This or That relating to the procreative act, more bands, a few civic leaders borne along in decorated carts to applause or execration. Brilliant streamers flew, and confetti in every color, and bird kites towed on ribbons, and banners that flared like the ice lights in northern kingdoms where sunlight came so seldom there were a hundred different words for darkness.

When it had all gone by at last, the throng of merrymakers followed it down the hill, shedding clothing as they went, donning masks, seizing flowers from hedges that grew over walls, lighting scarlet lamps; and it was Festival!

Though householders less inclined to revel at Pleasure’s fountains issued out into the street and swept up the stepped-on bits of sweet roll, or complained bitterly about the flowers torn from their hedges.

“Damned Anchor Street Bakery,” said Mrs. Smith, as she and Smith retreated through the lobby. “I may have some competition! With all those bloody cherubs throwing free treats to the crowd, the voting in the dessert category may be swayed.”

“Are you worried?”

“Not particularly,” she said, lighting her smoking tube.

“Free treats or not, the master baker at Anchor Street uses nothing but wholemeal flour. I’d like to see anybody make a palatable fairy cake out of a mess of stone-ground husks!”

She swept upstairs, trailing smoke, to don her finery for the contest. Smith followed her as far as the landing, where he rapped cautiously at the door to Lord Ermenwyr’s suite.

“Come in, damn you,” said a deathly voice from within.

Smith opened the door and peeked inside. Lord Ermenwyr was sprawled on the parlor couch with his head hanging backward off the edge and his eyes rolled back, so that for one panicky moment Smith thought he needed to be resuscitated.

“My lord?” He hurried inside. But the ghastly figure on the couch waved a feeble hand at him.

“Assist me, Smith. What time is it?”

“Halfway between Third and Fourth Prayer Interval,” said Smith, lifting Lord Ermenwyr into a sitting position.

“Doesn’t tell me a lot, does it, since I don’t worship your gods, and I wouldn’t pray to them even if I did,” moaned Lord Ermenwyr. “Is it drawing on toward evening, or are my eyes simply dying in their sockets?”

“It’ll be sunset in half an hour,” Smith said, fetching him a carafe of water and pouring him a cup.

“I wish I really was a vampire; I’d be feeling great about now.” Lord Ermenwyr looked around sourly. “But I am alone, abandoned by all who ever claimed they loved me.”

“We are still here, Master,” said a slightly reproachful voice. Smith turned, startled to note the four bodyguards lined up against the wall on either side of the balcony window. The glamour was off them and their true nature was quite evident; they resembled nothing so much as a quartet of standing stones with eyes and teeth, looming in the shadows.

“Well, aren’t you the faithful ones,” said Lord Ermenwyr, sipping from his cup. “Careful where you sit, Smith. The Variable Magnificent’s undoubtedly lurking around in the shape of an especially ugly end table or hassock.”

“No, I’m not,” said a voice from the bedroom, and Lord Eyrdway stepped into view. Smith had to stare a moment to be certain it was really he; for he had altered his height, appearing several inches shorter, and lengthened his nose, and moreover was wearing a full suit of immaculate formal evening dress.

“Hey!” Lord Ermenwyr cried in outrage. “I didn’t say you could wear my clothes! You’ll get slime all over them.”

“Ha-ha, you fell for it,” Lord Eyrdway said. “I wouldn’t wear your old suits anyway; the trouser crotches wouldn’t fit me. I only copied them. It’s all me, see?” He turned to display himself. “I’m going to go out and find a party. Who’ll recognize me with clothes on?”

“Want to hear me waste advice, Smith?” said Lord Ermenwyr. “Listen: Eyrdway, don’t drink. If you do, you will begin to boast, and as you’re not at home in the land of spoiled darlings, someone will take offense at your boasting and call you out, and then you’ll kill him, and then the bad people will chase you again. You don’t want that to happen, do you, Way-way?”

“It won’t happen, Worm-worm,” his brother told him, grinning evilly. “I’m going to be clever. I’m going to be brilliant, in fact.”

“Of course you will,” Lord Ermenwyr repeated, sagging back on the cushions. “How silly of me to imagine for a moment you’ll get yourself into trouble. Go. Have a wonderful time.” He sat forward abruptly and his voice sharpened, “But those had better not be my pearl earrings you’re wearing!”

“No, I copied those too,” said Lord Eyrdway, shooting his neck forward out of his collar a good two yards so he could dangle the earrings before his brother’s eyes. “You think I’d touch something that had been in your ears? Ugh!”

“Retract yourself! The last thing I need in my condition is a close-up of your face,” said Lord Ermenwyr, swatting at him with one of the cushions. “Perfidious princox!”

“I know you are, but what am I?”

“Get out!”

“I’m going,” Lord Eyrdway said, dancing to the door, colliding with it, then flinging it wide. “Look out, Salesh; you’ve never seen true youth and beauty until tonight!”

Lord Ermenwyr gagged.

“Open a window, Smith. I’d rather not vomit all over your carpets.”

“You could do with a little fresh air,” Smith said, opening the window and letting out some of the smoke. “No wonder you stop breathing all the time.”

“It’s not my fault I’m chronically ill,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “I was born sickly. It’s Daddy’s fault, probably. He didn’t infuse me with enough of the life force when he begot me. And the rest is Eyrdway’s fault. He used to try to smother me in the cradle when Nursie wasn’t looking, you know.”

“I guess these things happen in families,” said Smith. He took up a sofa cushion and used it as a fan to wave smoke out the window.

“Oh, the horror of siblings,” Lord Ermenwyr said, closing his bloodshot eyes. “You’re an orphan, aren’t you, Smith? Lucky man. Yet you’ve got people who love you. Nobody would shed a tear if I gasped out my irrevocable last.”

“You’re just saying that because you haven’t had your medication,” said Smith encouragingly. “Where’s Willowspear, anyway?”

“Vision questing, I assume,” Lord Ermenwyr replied. “Do you know how to give an injection?”

“A what?” Smith frowned in puzzlement.

“Where you shoot medicine into someone’s arm through a needle?”

Smith blanched. “Is that a demon thing?”

“I’d forgotten your race is dismally backward in medical practice,” Lord Ermenwyr sighed. “Fetch me the green box on my dresser, and I’ll show you.”

Smith found the box, and watched in horrified fascination as Lord Ermenwyr drew out a glass tube shaped like a hummingbird, with a long needle for a beak. Removing a tiny cartridge of something poison-green from the box, he flipped up the hummingbird’s tail feathers and loaded the cartridge; then opened and shut its tiny wings experimentally, until a livid green droplet appeared at the end of the needle.

“And Mr. Hummyhum is ready to play now,” said Lord Ermenwyr, rolling up his sleeve. Taking out an atomizer, he squeezed its bulb until a fine mist of something aromatic wet his arm; then, with a practiced jab, he gave himself an injection. Smith flinched.

“There. My pointless life is prolonged another night,” said Lord Ermenwyr wearily. “What are you looking so pale about? You’re an old hand at sticking sharp things into people.”

“It’s different when you’re killing,” said Smith. “But when you’re saving a life … it just seems perverse, somehow. Stabbing somebody to keep them alive, brr!”

“Remind me to tell you about invasive surgery sometime,” said Lord Ermenwyr, ejecting the spent cartridge and putting the hummingbird away. “Or trepanning! Think of it as making a doorway to let evil spirits out of the body, if it’ll help.”

“No, thanks,” said Smith fervently. He couldn’t take his eyes off the glass bird, however. “You could shoot poison into somebody with one of those things to kill them, and it’d barely leave a mark, would it?”

“You wouldn’t even need poison,” Lord Ermenwyr told him, rubbing his arm. “A bubble of air could do it. It’s not the sort of murder you could do by stealth very easily, though. Well, maybe you could. What, are you still trying to find out who killed that wretched journalist?”

Smith nodded.

“I know who didn’t kill him, and I know what he didn’t die of. That’s about it.”

“What did he die of, by the way?”

“I’ve no idea. There’s not a mark on him.”

“You haven’t done an autopsy?” Lord Ermenwyr turned to stare at him. Smith stared back. “Oh, don’t tell me you people don’t do autopsies either!”

“I don’t think we do,” Smith admitted. “What’s an autopsy?”

Lord Ermenwyr explained.

“But that’s desecrating the corpse!” yelled Smith. “Ye gods, you’d have the angry ghost and every one of his ancestors after you in this world and the next!”

“All you have to do is tell them you’re conducting a forensic analysis,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “I’ve never had any trouble.”

“I still couldn’t do it,” said Smith. “That’s even worse than sticking needles into somebody. Cutting up a corpse in cold blood’s an abomination.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about abominations, not me,” said Lord Ermenwyr, beginning to grin as his medication took affect. “Look here, why don’t I do the job for you? I take it the idea of a demon fooling around with a corpse doesn’t violate your sense of propriety quite as badly?”

“I guess it would be different for you,” Smith conceded.

“Well then!” Lord Ermenwyr sprang to his feet. “I’ve even got a set of autopsy tools with me. Isn’t that lucky? One ought never to travel unprepared, at least that’s what Daddy says. The restaurant’s closed tonight, isn’t it? We can just open him up in the kitchen!”

“No!” Smith protested. “What if he decided to haunt in there, ever after? The restaurant’s our whole reputation. We could be ruined!”

“And it wouldn’t be terribly sanitary, either, I suppose,” Lord Ermenwyr said, rummaging in a drawer. “Where did I leave that bone saw? No matter; we’ll just wait until everyone’s gone off to Festival, and we’ll bring him up here. More privacy!”

Smith went downstairs and waited, nervously, as one by one the guests came down in their Festival costumes and walked out or ordered bearers to take them into the heart of town, where most of the evening’s Festival activities were going on. Mrs. Smith emerged from the kitchen, followed by Crucible and Pinion bearing between them the Sea Dragon Bombe on a vast platter. It was glorious to see, spreading wings like fans of ruby glass, and light glittered on its thousand emerald scales.

Mrs. Smith herself was no less resplendent, swathed in tented magnificence of peacock-blue satin and cloth of gold, her hair elaborately coifed, her lips crimsoned. A wave of perfume went before and followed her.

“We’re off to the civic banqueting hall. Wish me luck, Smith,” she said. “I’ll need it. I’ve just been informed the Anchor Street Bakery got a shipment of superfine manchet flour from Old Troon Mills this morning.”

“Good luck,” said Smith. “They use too much butter-cream, anyway.”

“And the bombe is loaded with aphrodisiacs,” said Mrs. Smith, pulling out her best smoking tube—black jade, a foot long and elaborately carved—and setting it between her teeth. “So we must hope for the best. Be a dear and give us a light?”

Smith gave her a light and a kiss. As he leaned close, Mrs. Smith murmured; “Burnbright’s gone out with young Willowspear.”

“You mean to the Festival?” Smith started.

“They spent ages out there together on the parapet,” she said. “When I went into the bar to get a bottle of passion-fruit liqueur for the serving sauce, they came sneaking through. Thought I didn’t see them. But I saw their faces; I know that look. They ran out through the garden and went over the wall. I don’t expect they’ll be back until morning, but you might leave the side door unlocked.”

Smith was trying to imagine Willowspear doing something as earthly as scrambling over a wall with a girl. “Right,” he said, nodding slowly. “Side door. Well. Return victorious, Mrs. Smith.”

“Death to our enemies,” she replied grimly. Pulling her yards of train over one arm and puffing out clouds of smoke, she strode forth into the night, and Crucible and Pinion followed her with the bombe.

Leaving Bellows on duty in the lobby and the two other Smiths in the bar to deal with any late-night emergencies, Smith hurried upstairs and rapped twice on Lord Ermenwyr’s door. It was immediately flung wide by Lord Ermenwyr, who stood there grinning from ear to ear.

“All clear?”

“All clear.”

“Come on, boys!” He shot out of his room past Smith and went clattering down the stairs, and the four bodyguards thundered after him.

“Er—” Smith waved frantically, attempting to direct attention to the fact that Cutt had his head on backward. Lord Ermenwyr turned, spotted the problem, giggled, and corrected it with a wave of his hand.

“Sorry,” he said in a loud stage whisper. “Come on, where’s the you-know?”

Smith hurried down to join them and led the party back to the kitchen, where they descended into the cold cellar. Coppercut was gray and stiff as a board, which put smuggling him upstairs in an empty barrel out of the question. At last, after a certain amount of grisly hilarity and impractical, not to say criminal, suggestions, they settled for draping the corpse in sacking and carrying him out. Smith prayed there wouldn’t be any guests in the lobby, and there weren’t; after Bellows gave them the all clear and waved them through, they took the body up the stairs, tottering under it like a crowd of mismatched ants toting a dead beetle.

Thoroughly unnerved by the time they were back in Lord Ermenwyr’s suite, Smith was relieved to see neither black candles nor dark-fumed incense lit, but only bright lamps arranged around a table that had been tidily covered with oilcloth. On a smaller table close at hand were laid out edged tools of distressingly culinary design.

“Let’s just plop him down over there,” said Lord Ermenwyr, slipping out from under the corpse to shut the door. “Boys, cut his clothes off.”

“Don’t cut them, for gods’ sake,” said Smith. “I’ve still got to hand him over to Crossbrace tomorrow. If he’s naked with a big hole in him, that’ll raise some questions, won’t it?”

“Too true,” Lord Ermenwyr said. “All right; just get the clothes off him somehow, boys.”

The bodyguards set to their task obligingly, and though Coppercut’s body went through some maneuvers that could best be described as terribly undignified, his clothes came off at last.

“It’s like one of those puzzles,” growled Crish happily, holding up Coppercut’s tunic. “You can do it; you just have to think really hard.”

“Good for you,” said Lord Ermenwyr, removing his own jacket and shirt. He stripped a sheet from the bed and tied it around his neck like an immense trailing napkin. Smith paced nervously, watching the proceedings and silently apologizing to Coppercut.

“Now then.” Lord Ermenwyr stepped up to the corpse and studied it. “What have we got? A male Child of the Sun, dead roughly a day and a half. Looks to be in the prime of life. No signs of chronic illness present. Well-healed scar on the right side, between the third and fourth ribs. Someone once took a shot at you with, hm, a pistol bolt? Missed anything vital, though. Otherwise unscarred and well nourished. Some evidence of initial processes of putrefaction.”

Smith groaned. “Get on with it, please!”

“You want me to find out what killed him, don’t you?” Lord Ermenwyr replied. He peered into Coppercut’s eyes and ears, felt gingerly all over his skull. “No evidence of head injury. Nobody sneaked up and coshed him from behind. Signs of asphyxia present. Internal suffocation? I’m betting on poison. Let’s see the stomach contents.”

He selected a small knife from the table at his elbow and made a long incision down Coppercut’s front. Smith, watching, felt himself break out in a cold sweat.

“Let’s see, where does your race keep their stomachs? I remember now… here we go. Come and help me, Smith. Oh, all right! Strangel, hand him the lamp and you come help me. Honestly, Smith, what kind of an assassin were you?”

“A quick one,” Smith panted, averting his face. “Even on the battlefield you have to hack off arms and heads and things, but—but it’s all in the heat of the moment. It’s nothing like this. I guess you learned how from your lord father?”

The bodyguards started to genuflect and narrowly stopped themselves, as lamplight flickered crazily in the room and Crish nearly dropped what Lord Ermenwyr had given him to hold.

“Steady,” warned Lord Ermenwyr. “No … I learned it from Mother, if you want to know the truth. It’s her opinion that if you study the processes of death, you can save other lives. Don’t imagine she trembles over the dissecting table either, Smith. She has nerves of ice. Real Good can be as ruthless as Evil when it wants to accomplish something, let me tell you.”

“I guess so.” Smith wiped his brow and got control of his nerves.

“He didn’t eat much. I’d say his stomach was empty when he got here. Had … wine, had Mrs. Smith’s delightful fried eel… looks like a bit of buttered roll… what’s this stuff?”

“He ate his appetizer,” Smith stated. “I think it was fish.”

“Fish, yes. Those dreadful little raw fish petits fours Salesh is so proud of? That’s what these are, then. I can’t imagine how you people manage to eat them, especially with all those incendiary sauces … oh.”

“Oh?”

“I think I’ve found what did for him, Smith,” said Lord Ermenwyr in an odd voice. He reached for a pair of tweezers and picked something out of the depths of Coppercut, and held it out into the lamplight, turning it this way and that. Smith peered at it. It was a small gray lump of matter.

“What the hell is that?”

“Unless I’m much mistaken—” Lord Ermenwyr took up a finely ground lens in a frame and screwed it into his eye. He studied the object closely. “And I’m not, this is a bloatfish liver.”

“And that would be?”

Lord Ermenwyr removed the lens and regarded him. “You were a weapons man, weren’t you? Not a poisons man. I’d bet you’ve never sold fish, either.”

“No, I never did. Bloatfish liver is poisonous?”

“Deadly poisonous.” Lord Ermenwyr spoke with an unaccustomed gravity. “The rest of the fish is safe to eat, but the liver is so full of toxin most cities have an ordinance requiring that it be removed before the fish can be sold. Perhaps Salesh isn’t as safety-conscious. In any case, this got into his fish appetizer. He had three minutes to live from the moment he swallowed it down.”

Smith groaned. “So it was his dinner. Not Scourbrass’s Foaming Wonder.”

“Yes, but I don’t think you have to worry about losing your catering license,” said Lord Ermenwyr, setting aside the liver and beginning to replace Coppercut’s organs. “This wasn’t negligence. It was deliberate murder. The liver was incised laterally to make sure the poison was released. Anyway, you don’t just stick a whole bloatfish liver inside a Salesh Roll by mistake!”

Smith bowed his head and swore quietly.

Coppercut had been sutured up and was having his garments wrestled back on when there came a sharp knock at the door.

“What?” demanded Lord Ermenwyr, removing his makeshift apron and reaching for his shirt.

“It’s me,” said Lord Eyrdway from the hallway.

“Bathroom,” hissed Lord Ermenwyr to his bodyguards, gesturing at the corpse. They grabbed it up and carried it off. “He tends to get overexcited if he sees cadavers,” he explained to Smith in an undertone, then raised his voice. “You’re back early. What’s the matter? Wasn’t Salesh impressed with your beauty?” he inquired, buttoning up his shirt.

“Oh, I made a big splash.” Lord Eyrdway’s voice was gleeful. “And I stayed sober, too, nyah nyah! But the most amazing thing happened. Are you going to let me in? I’ve brought you a present.”

Lord Ermenwyr’s eyes narrowed to slits as he shrugged into his jacket.

“Really,” he said noncommittally. In an undertone, he added; “Smith, would you be so kind as to open the door? But do it quickly, and stand well back. He’s up to some ghastly practical joke.”

Smith, who was sitting on the floor having a stiff drink, struggled to his feet and went to the door. He opened it and stood back. There on the threshold was Lord Eyrdway, his formal appearance a little disheveled. Behind him in the hall stood another gentleman, whose evening dress was still perfectly creased and immaculate.

“Hello, Smith,” Lord Eyrdway said. “Look who I met in the Front Street Ballroom, brother!”

Lord Ermenwyr’s eyes went perfectly round with horror. The other gentleman strode past Lord Eyrdway into the room, looking grimly triumphant.

“Glorious Slave of Scharathrion,” he said in the resonant voice of a mage, “I hereby challenge you to thaumaturgical combat.”

“You’ll have to fight him now,” added Lord Eyrdway, shutting and bolting the door behind them. “For the honor of our house.”

“Despicable coward!” said Deviottin Blichbiss. He was a tall portly man, or at least was wearing the shape of one, with neatly parted hair and a sharp-edged mustache. “Did you really think I wouldn’t hunt you down amongst these wretched mundanes? Now you’ll die like a rat in a wall, as you richly deserve.”

“I’m not a well man,” said Lord Ermenwyr in a faint voice. “I’m afraid I’m not up to your challenge.”

“You’re afraid!” gloated Blichbiss. “And whether you’re well, sick, or dead, we’re going to duel in this room tonight. It’s not a customary combat location, but mundane cities are within the permitted areas.”

“Oh, you’re lying,” said Lord Ermenwyr, pulling at his beard in agitation.

“I most certainly am not. And if you were any kind of scholar, instead of the spoiled scion of a jumped-up Black Arts gladiator, you’d know that!”

“Are you going to let him talk about Daddy that way?” demanded Lord Eyrdway.

“I quote as precedent the Codex Smagdaranthine, fourth chapter, line 136: ‘And it came to pass that in the mundane city of Celissa, in the seventh year of Fuskus the Tyrant’s reign, Tloanix Hasherets was done grave insult by Prindo Goff, and therefore challenged him to wizardly battle, whereupon they dueled in the third hour after midnight in the central square of the city, and Hasherets smote Goff down with a bolt of balefire, and scattered his ashes in the fountain there,’” recited Blichbiss in a steely voice.

“But you haven’t got a second,” Lord Ermenwyr pointed out.

“I’ll be his second,” said Lord Eyrdway. “Smith can be yours.”

“You traitor!”

The bodyguards came shuffling into the room and stopped, staring at Blichbiss. A low growl issued from Cutt’s throat. All four of them began to drool. Lord Ermenwyr put his hands in his pockets, smirking.

“And then again, my gentlemen here just might tear you into little pieces,” he said.

“No, they won’t,” Lord Eyrdway assured Blichbiss. “They take orders from my family, and I’ve got precedence over my little brother. You can’t kill this man, boys, do you understand? That’s a direct order. He’s insulted Lord Ermenwyr, and so he’s Lord Ermenwyr’s kill alone.”

The bodyguards drew back, looking at one another in some confusion. There was a taut silence in the room as they worked out the semantics of their terms of bondage, and finally Cutt nodded and bowed deeply, as did the other three.

“We respectfully withdraw, Masters,” he said.

Smith shifted his grip on the bottle he was holding, just the slightest of movements, but Lord Eyrdway turned his head at once.

“Don’t try it, Smith, or I’ll kill you,” he said. “And I’d really be sorry, because I like you, but mortals shouldn’t get mixed up in these things.”

“Thank you for the thought, however, Smith,” said Lord Ermenwyr, with a hint of returning bravado. “Way-way, you are going to be in so much trouble with Mother.”

Lord Eyrdway blanched.

“I’m doing you a favor, you whiner,” he said plaintively. “You can’t always run from everything that scares you. Fight the man!”

“Yes,” said Blichbiss, who had been standing there with his arms folded, looking on in saturnine triumph. “Fight me.”

“Very well.” Lord Ermenwyr shot his cuffs and drew himself up. “I assume I get choice of weapons, as is customary?”

Blichbiss nodded, hard-eyed.

“Then, given the fact that we’re indoors and my second here has personal property at risk, I think we’ll just avoid incendiary spells, if you’ve no objection?”

“None.”

“So, under the circumstances, I think … I choose … Fatally Verbal Abuse!” cried Lord Ermenwyr.

Blichbiss’s eyes flashed. “Typical of you. And I accept!”

Smith racked his brains, trying to remember what he’d ever heard of mages and their preferred means of killing one another. He vaguely recalled that Fatally Verbal Abuse was considered a low-caliber weapon. It had none of the glamour or impact of, say, a Purple Dragon Invocation or a Spell of Gradual Unmaking. In fact, there was some dispute as to whether it constituted an actual magickal weapon at all, given the propensity of people to believe what they are told about themselves anyway, and their tendency to fulfill negative expectations. There were those on the fabled Black Council who held that only the process of accelerated impact qualified it as a valid means of score-settling between arcanes.

This was not to say that Fatally Verbal Abuse could not produce dramatic results, however, or that strategy was not required in its use.

Blichbiss cleared his throat. He stood straight. “The first assault is mine, under the ancient rules of combat. Prepare yourself.”

Lord Ermenwyr stiffened. Blichbiss drew a deep breath.

“You,” he said, “are a twisted, underdeveloped dwarf with a bad tailor!”

Lord Eyrdway chortled. Smith gaped as, before his eyes, Lord Ermenwyr began to warp and shrink, and his suit seemed to become too long in one leg and too short in one arm.

Lord Ermenwyr bared his teeth and replied; “No, I am a handsome and exquisitely dressed fellow of somewhat less than average height while you are a squawking duck with gas!”

Blichbiss shuddered all over and dwindled, farting explosively, as Lord Ermenwyr and his suit returned to their normal proportions. Through the emerging bill that was replacing his teeth, Blichbiss managed to quack out the counterspell; “No, I am a gas-free man with neither wings nor bill who speaks in pure and persuasive tones, whereas you are a streak of black slime in a crack in the floor, soon to be scrubbed into oblivion!”

And like an expanding balloon he resumed his original shape, as Lord Ermenwyr seemed to dissolve, to darken, to sink down toward a crack in the floor…

“No!” he gurgled desperately. “I am a straight sound mage, mildew-resistant and clean in all my parts, but you are a one-legged castrated blind dog with mange!”

Whereupon he became the upright mage he said he was, and the black fungus that had begun to cover his face vanished; but Blichbiss toppled to the floor, clutching at his groin with swiftly withering arms, and turning his blind scabrous furry face he howled; “No! I am a man, full and complete and strong upon both my legs, clearly seeing that you are a toad whose teeth have grown together, preventing your speech!”

“Whoops,” said Lord Eyrdway gleefully, for both he and Smith had caught the fallacy: Toads have no teeth. “Tried too hard to be clever!”

Lord Ermenwyr jerked back, an agonized look on his face as his teeth snapped shut. He struggled to get out words as he began to shrink and change color; as his mouth widened, the rest of the incantation cycled through and the teeth vanished. He made a horrible noise, just perceptible as words, “No! I am no toad but a man, with perfect and flawless dentition, clearly capable of stating that you are a mere giant mayfly with no mouth at all!”

“No!” gasped Blichbiss, as gauzy wings burst from the back of his dinner jacket. “I am a"—her reached up and tore at his elongating face to prevent his mouth from sealing before he could finish the counterspell—"a man with a mouth such as all men have, and no wings nor any brief life span, whereas you are a cheap tallow taper, your mouth wide with molten wax, your tongue the black wick, awrithe with living flame!”

“No!” Lord Ermenwyr screamed, spitting fire. “I am a man, and my tongue is supple, alive and flameless, no tallow to block my loud pronouncement that you are no man at all but a hanging effigy of old clothes stuffed with paper, your face a painted sack, your mouth a mere painted line, incapable of utterance!”

“Gurk!” exclaimed Blichbiss, as a noose appeared from nowhere and hoisted him up by the neck. “No! I am not hanging and—” He ripped his sealing mouth open again. “I am a mage whose curses are swift and always deadly, with a quick mouth to pronounce that you,"—and a terrible gleam came into his eyes—"are a pusillanimous little half-breed nouveau-arcane psychopath who richly deserves the inescapable blast of witchfire that is about to electrocute him where he stands!”

“Hey!” said Smith in dismay, and Lord Eyrdway looked confused as he played the spell back in his head; but Lord Ermenwyr, his eyes bugging from their sockets, stared up at the crackling circle of white-hot energy that had just begun to circle his head. He shrieked the first thing that came to mind: “I know you are, but what am I?”

With his last syllable the witchfire reached critical mass and shot out a ravening tongue of lightning, hitting Blichbiss square in the middle of his waistcoat. That gentleman had just time to look outraged before he made a sizzling noise, his sinuses discharged copiously, and the fire engulfed him in a crackling blaze for the space of three seconds before vanishing with a loud popping sound.

Blichbiss fell backward with a crash, smoke and steam rising from his slightly charred mustache. He had been felled by the deadliest of counterspells, the one against which there is no appeal. So simple is its operative principle, even little children grasp it instinctively; so puissant is it in its demoralizing effect, grown men have been driven to inadvertent self-destruction, as Blichbiss now was evidence. Oddly enough, his clothes were almost untouched.

“That was cheating, that last one,” said Lord Eyrdway. “Wasn’t it? I thought you said no incendiary spells.”

Lord Ermenwyr turned on him in fury. “Of course he cheated, you dunce! But it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d managed to kill me.”

“Of course it would have,” Lord Eyrdway said reasonably. “Then Smith could have appealed his victory to the Black Council, as your second.”

“A lot of good that would have done me, wouldn’t it?” Lord Ermenwyr said, trembling in every limb as the reaction set in. He staggered backward and, like a landslide, his bodyguards surrounded him and caught him before he fell. Cutt set him gently into an armchair.

“Master is drained,” he said solicitously. “Master is exhausted. What Master needs now, to restore his strength, is to eat his enemy’s liver fresh-torn from his miserably defeated body, while it’s still warm. Shall I tear out the liver for you, Master?”

“Gods, no!” cried Lord Ermenwyr in disgust.

“But it’s good for you,” said Cutt gently, “and you need it. It’s full of arcane energies. It will replenish you with the life force of your enemy. Your lord father—” pause for group genuflection—"always consumes the livers of those so rash as to assail him. If they have been particularly offensive, he eats their hearts as well. Come now, little Master, won’t you even try it?”

“He’s right, you know,” Lord Eyrdway said. “And think of the publicity! Nobody’s ever going to challenge your right to be guild treasurer again. I wouldn’t mind a bit of the bastard’s heart, myself.”

“Can I get it cooked?” asked Lord Ermenwyr.

“No!” said all the guards and Lord Eyrdway together.

“That would destroy much of its arcane wholesomeness,” Cutt explained.

“Then I’m damned well having condiments,” Lord Ermenwyr decided. “Smith, can you get me pepper and salt and a lemon?”

“Right,” said Smith, and fled.

At least the sorcerous duel seemed to have passed unnoticed by anyone else, though Bellows gave him an inquiring look as he raced back from the kitchen with the condiments Lord Ermenwyr had requested. He just rolled his eyes in reply and hurried back upstairs.

When he reentered the suite, Blichbiss’s body had been laid out on the dissecting table, and Lord Ermenwyr was attempting to wrench open the waistcoat and dress shirt.

“He shouldn’t be exhibiting rigor mortis this early,” he was complaining. “Unless that’s the effect of the spell. Hello, Smith, just set those down anywhere. Damn him, these buttons have melted!”

“Rip it open,” Lord Eyrdway suggested.

“Tear apart your vanquished enemy,” Cutt counseled. “Slash into his flesh and seize the smoking liver in your mighty teeth! Wrest it forth and devour it, as his soul wails and wrings its hands, and let his blood run from your beard!”

“I don’t think I’m quite up to that, actually,” said Lord Ermenwyr, sweating. He cut the garments apart, laid open Blichbiss with a quick swipe of a knife, and peered at the liver in question. “Oh, gods, it looks vile.”

“You didn’t mind slicing up Coppercut,” Smith remarked.

“Autopsying people is one thing. Eating them’s quite another,” said Lord Ermenwyr, gingerly cutting the liver out. “Eek, damn—look, now it’s got on my shirt, that stain’ll never come out. Hand me that plate, Smith.”

Smith, deciding he would never understand demons, obliged. Lord Ermenwyr laid Blichbiss’s liver out on the plate and began cutting it up, turning his face away. “Oh, the smell—Did you bring a juicer with that lemon, Smith? I’ll never be able to keep this down—”

“What are you doing?” said Lord Eyrdway, looking on scandalized.

“I’m fixing Liver Tartare, or I’m not eating this thing at all,” his brother snarled. “And the rest of you can just get those offended looks off your faces. Smith, you’d better go before you pass out.”

Smith left gratefully.

He went downstairs, where Old Smith and New Smith were dozing in a booth, and woke them and sent them off to bed. Then he fixed himself a drink and sat alone in the darkened bar, sipping his drink slowly, reviewing the events of the last two days.

When he heard Mrs. Smith returning with Crucible and Pinion, he emerged from the bar. “How did it go?” he inquired.

Crucible and Pinion, who were staggering slightly, threw their fists into the air and gave warrior grunts of victory. Mrs. Smith held up her gold medal.

“A triumph,” she said quietly. She looked into Smith’s eyes. “Boys, I think you’d best go to bed.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Pinion thickly, and he and Crucible staggered away.

“Why don’t we go talk in the kitchen?” Mrs. Smith suggested. She started down the passageway, and Smith followed, carrying his drink.

In the kitchen, Mrs. Smith removed her medal and hung it above the stove. She considered it a moment before turning and drawing out a chair. She draped her gown’s train over one arm and sat down; and, with leisurely movements, took out and filled her smoking tube.

“A light, please, Smith,” she requested.

He lit a straw at the stove, digging in the banked coals, and held it out for her. She puffed until the amberleaf lit and sat back.

“Well?” she said.

“How would I get hold of a bloatfish liver, if I wanted one?” Smith asked her.

“Simple,” said Mrs. Smith. “You’d just walk down to the waterfront when the fishermen were sorting through their catches, before the fish-market dealers got there. You’d find a fisherman and ask if he had any nice live bloatfish. You might play the foolish old woman, a bit. And you’d listen very carefully when the fisherman told you how to filet the fish once you’d got it home, and thank him for his warning about the nasty liver. Then you’d carry the bloatfish home in a pail.

“And,” she went on composedly, “if there was a particularly wicked man asking for an early dinner … and if you knew he’d ruined a few innocent people in his time and even driven a couple of them to suicide … and if you knew a little girl was crying her eyes out because he’d threatened her with what amounts to a death sentence unless she slept with him, even though she’d just fallen in love with someone else… and moreover this wicked man wanted her to give him information that would betray certain other persons … Well, then, Smith, I expect something rather dreadful might find its way into the appetizer he’d ordered.

“Mind you, I admit to nothing,” she added. “But I have absolutely no regrets.”

Smith sat in silence a moment, turning his drink in his hands, watching the ice melt. “Information that would betray certain other persons,” he echoed. “He wasn’t sure about you yet, but if he’d scared Burnbright badly enough, he’d have had you; and you’ve got a restaurant and a reputation to lose. Much better prospect for blackmail.

“You sneaked up there in the dark and burned most of his notes, but someone—probably Burnbright—interrupted you before you finished. You had the feast to get on the table, and Burnbright to calm down, so you never got back in there to burn the rest of the papers before Pinion discovered the murder.”

Mrs. Smith exhaled smoke and watched him, silent. At last he said, “Tell me how you got mixed up in the Spellmetal massacre.”

She sighed.

“Years ago,” she said, “I was working for the old Golden Chain caravan line. We got a party of passengers bound for the country up around Karkateen.

“It was the Sunborn and his followers. They’d just been thrown out of one town, so they’d chartered passage to another. But the Sunborn had already begun to talk of founding a city where all races would live together in perfect amity.

“When they left the caravan at Karkateen, I went with them.”

“Had you become a convert?” Smith asked. She shook her head, her eyes fixed on something distant, and she shrugged.

“I was just a bad girl out for a good time,” she said. “I didn’t believe the races could live together in peace. I didn’t believe one man could change the world. But the Sunborn asked me to come, and … if he’d asked me to jump from the top of a tower, I’d have done it. You never heard him speak, Smith, or you’d understand.

“He had the strangest gift for making one clean, no matter what he did in bed with one. He carried innocence with him like a cloak he could throw about your shoulders. With him, you felt as though you were forgiven for every wrong thing you’d ever done… and love became a sacrament, meant something far more than grappling for pleasure in the dark.

“Well. There were nearly thirty of us, of mixed races. Of the Children of the Sun there were a few boys and girls from well-to-do families. There was me; there were a couple of outcasts, half-breeds, and one girl who was blind; and there was a young man who always seemed uncomfortable with us, but he was the Sunborn’s kinsman, and so he followed him out of a sense of family duty. Ramack, his name was. The greenies were all a wild lot, nothing like the ones you meet here running shops. Gorgeous savages. Poets. Musicians.

“It was a mad life. It was wonderful, and stupid, and exhausting. We committed excesses you couldn’t begin to imagine. We starved, we wandered in the rain, we danced in our rags and picked flowers by the side of the highway. It was everything Festival is supposed to be, but with a soul, Smith!

“The Sunborn joined me to a Yendri man, and blessed our union in the name of racial harmony. I suppose I loved Hladderin well enough; greenies make reasonably good lovers, and he was drop-dead beautiful too. But I loved the Sunborn more.

“When Mogaron Spellmetal joined us, he suggested we all go live on his family’s land. Away we went, dancing and singing. I bore Hladderin a child … what can I say? He was a pretty baby. I was never the motherly type, but his father thought the world of him.

“He was just six months old the day House Spellmetal showed up with their army.”

“You don’t have to talk about this part, if it’s painful,” said Smith.

“I won’t talk about it. I still can’t… but during the fighting, a grenade blew out the back wall of the garden. And when it was over, I ran like mad through the break, and so did a lot of others. I looked back and saw Hladderin fall with one of those damned long black arrows through his throat. Right after him came Ramack carrying the blind girl, her name was Haisa, she’d been a special favorite of the Sunborn’s because he said she was a seeress. She was in labor at that very moment. Her baby picked that time of all times for its inauspicious birth!

“Ramack and Haisa got out alive, though. I waved to them, and Ramack spotted the ditch where I’d taken cover, and they joined me there. We managed to crawl away from the slaughter, and by nightfall we were safe. I don’t know what happened to the others.

“Haisa had her baby that night. It was a little girl.”

“Burnbright?” asked Smith. Mrs. Smith nodded.

“We hid in the wilderness for a couple of weeks, weeping and trying to think what to do. It was hard to get our brains engaged again, after all that long ecstatic time. Ramack decided at last that the best thing to do was to throw ourselves on the mercy of the authorities. We hadn’t heard yet about how Mogaron had died, you see, or his father’s blood oath, and since Ramack had never really been a believer in the Sun-born, he didn’t mind recanting. In the end he and Haisa went off to Karkateen and gave themselves up. You know what happened to them. At least the assassins missed the baby.”

“Why didn’t you go?” Smith asked.

“I wasn’t willing to recant,” Mrs. Smith replied. “And I had my child to think of. But what kind of life would he have had with me, under the circumstances, being the color he was? I’d heard the stories of the Green Witch, as we used to call her on the caravan routes. Our nasty little lord’s sainted Mother. Hladderin had told me she took in orphans.

“So I carried him up to the Greenlands, and I climbed that black mountain. I came to a fearful black gate where demons in plate armor leered at me. But a disciple in white robes came down, practically glowing with reflected holiness, and took the child off my hands and promised to keep him safe. And that was that.

“I went down the mountain and took sanctuary myself for a while, in the Abbey at Kemeldion. When the scandal had become old news, I changed my name to Smith and got a job cooking for your cousin’s caravan line. It was work I knew, and, besides, it seemed like a good idea to keep moving.

“I kept track of what the Karkateen authorities had done with Burnbright, which was the alias they had sensibly given her. When your cousin needed a runner to replace one that had quit, I suggested he pick one up in Mount Flame. By sheer good luck he got little Burnbright. I’ve looked out for her ever since, for her father’s sake.”

Loud in the sleeping house, they heard the sound of footsteps approaching. A moment later the kitchen door opened, and Lord Ermenwyr looked in. He was very pale.

“I wonder whether I might get something for indigestion?” he inquired. “But I see I’m interrupting serious talk.”

“Fairly serious,” Smith said.

“Yes, I thought you’d have to have a certain conversation sooner or later.” The lordling pulled out a stool and sat down at the table. “May I respectfully suggest that no one do anything rash? If by some silly chance somebody accidentally happened to, oh, I don’t know, commit a murder or something—which I’m sure would have been completely justified, whatever the circumstances—well, you wouldn’t believe the unsavory incidents my family has hushed up.”

“I’ll bet I would,” said Mrs. Smith. She got up and fetched a bottle of after-dinner bitters, and mixed a mineral-water cocktail, which she presented to Lord Ermenwyr. She sank heavily into her chair again. He lifted his glass to her.

“Consider this a gesture of trust in your excellent good sense,” he said, and drank it down. “Ah. Really, I’m very fond of you both, and I’m not about to let truth and justice prevail. We’ll sweep the odious Coppercut under the carpet somehow—”

More footsteps. The door swung open, and Burnbright and Willowspear stood there, holding hands. They were pale too. They looked scared.

“We—” said Burnbright.

“That is, we—” said Willowspear.

They fell silent, staring at the party around the table. Lord Ermenwyr’s mouth fell open. After a moment of attempted speech, he finally sputtered: “You? Damn you, Willowspear, I wanted a piece of that! Burnbright, my love, if you thought he was a jolly romp, wait until you’ve danced the three-legged stamp with me!”

“No,” said Burnbright, as Willowspear put his arm around her. “I’m in love with him. I—I don’t know how it happened. It just happened!”

“I don’t know how it happened,” Willowspear echoed. “It just happened. Like lightning dropping from the sky.”

“Like a big ship bearing down on you out of the fog,” said Burnbright.

“There was nothing we could do,” said Willowspear, seeming dazed. “I had my duty—and my vows—and I always thought that She was the only love I would ever need, but—”

“I never wanted to fall in love,” said Burnbright tearfully. “And then—the whole world changed.”

Mrs. Smith shook her head.

“And you both look perfectly miserable,” said Lord Ermenwyr smoothly. “But, my dears, you’re both getting all upset over nothing! You’re forgetting that it’s Festival. This is a momentary fever, an illusion, a dream! Tomorrow you’ll both be able to walk away from each other without regrets. And if not tomorrow, the next day, or soon after. Trust me, darlings. It’ll pass.”

“No,” said Willowspear, his voice shaking. “It will never pass. I won’t blaspheme against Love.” He looked at Mrs. Smith. “I had had a dream, lady. I was an infant hidden in a bush. Another child was laid beside me, tiny and lost. I knew she was an orphan, a child of misfortune, and I wanted to take her in my arms and protect her.

“When I woke, I went to the Compassionate One and begged Her for my dream’s meaning. She told me I must find my life where it began.”

Awkwardly he came to her, leading Burnbright by the hand, and knelt. “Lady, I mean to marry Teeba. Give me your blessing.”

He reached out his hand and touched her face. Mrs. Smith flinched; a tear ran down her cheek.

“Now you’ve done it,” she said hoarsely. “Now we’re both caught.” She reached up and took his hand.

“Marry?” cried Lord Ermenwyr. “Are you mad? Look at the pair of you! Look at the world you’ll have to live in! I can tell you something about mixed marriages, my friend! You’ve no idea how hard it is to be Mother and Daddy’s son.”

Willowspear ignored him. “I never would have troubled you,” he told Mrs. Smith. “But word came to us that there was a man like a jackal, seeking out anyone who had followed the Sunborn. I knew he would hunt down my mother.

“The Compassionate One bid me go with Her son to this city. I meant to warn you. But then, the man was slain … and I saw Teeba, and it was as though I had known her all my life.”

“That’s not her real name,” said Mrs. Smith. “Her name is Kalya.”

“Really?” Burnbright squeaked. “Oh, that’s wonderful! I’ve always hated Teeba!”

“Use the old name at your peril, child,” Mrs. Smith told her. “You’re not safe, even after all these years. And how do you think you’ll live?” She looked from one to the other of them in despair. “What do you imagine you’ll do, open a shop in Greenietown? You think you’ll be welcome even there, the pair of you?”

“I could still be a runner here,” said Burnbright. “And—” She looked at Smith in desperate appeal. “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if we had a house doctor? My friend Orecrash at the Hotel Sea-Air says all the really elegant places have a doctor on the premises, like at the spa. And rich people like to go to—to Yendri doctors, because they’re exotic and have all this mystic wisdom and like that. He could teach them meditation. Or something. Please?”

“We could try,” said Smith.

“Madness,” Lord Ermenwyr growled. “Sheer madness.”

“It isn’t either!” Burnbright rounded on him. “We won’t need anything else, if we have each other.”

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” said. Mrs. Smith sadly. “Either of you. You can’t imagine how hard it’ll be. But it can’t be helped now, can it? So you have my blessing. And I wish you luck; you’ll need it.”

“Nobody’s asking for my blessing,” complained Lord Ermenwyr. “Or even my permission.”

Willowspear stood and faced him. “My lord, your lady Mother—”

“I know, I know, this was all her doing. She knew perfectly well what would happen when she sent you down here,” said Lord Ermenwyr wearily. “Meddling in people’s lives to bring them love and joy and spiritual fulfillment, just as she’s always doing. Didn’t bother to tell me anything about it, of course, but why should she? I’m just miserable little Ermenwyr, the only living man in Salesh who hasn’t had sex this Festival.”

“That’s not true,” said Smith.

“Well, that’s a comfort, isn’t it? All right, Willowspear, you’re formally excused from my service. Go be a mystic holy man house doctor to a people who’d as soon stone you as look at you. You’ll have to register with the city authorities, you know, as a resident greenie, and take an oath not to poison their wells or defile their wives. You’ll come running back up the mountain the next time there’s a race riot—if you can run fast enough.”

“Anybody who tried to hurt him would have to kill me first!” said Burnbright, putting her arms around Willowspear and holding tight.

“I see,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “I suppose in that case there’s not the slightest chance you’d be willing to give me a quick tumble before the wedding? A little bit of Lord’s Right, you know, just so you can say you shopped around before you bought?”

“Dream on,” she retorted.

“Well, you’ll never know what you missed,” Lord Ermenwyr grumbled. “Oh, go to bed, both of you. I’m ready to puke from all the devotion in here.”

“My lord.” Willowspear bowed low. He turned to Mrs. Smith, took her hand, and kissed it. “Madam.”

“Go on,” she said.

He clasped hands once again with Burnbright, and they went out. Burnbright’s voice floated back, saying:

“…bed’s too narrow, but that’s all right; we can just move it out and sleep on the floor!”

“Smith, however shall they manage?” cried Mrs. Smith. “That child hasn’t got the brains the gods gave lettuce!”

“We’ll look after them, I guess,” said Smith. “And she’s sharper than you give her credit for.”

“She’s every inch the fool her father was,” said Mrs. Smith.

A silence followed her statement, until they once again heard the sound of footsteps approaching. Slightly unsteady footsteps.

The kitchen door opened, and Lord Eyrdway leaned in, grinning. His ruffled shirtfront was drenched in gore.

“I have to tell you, you’re missing a great party,” he informed his brother. “Did you know there was another corpse in your bathroom?”

Smith groaned and put his head in his hands.

“Eyrdway, they needed that body!” Lord Ermenwyr sprang to his feet.

“Oops.” Lord Eyrdway looked at Smith and Mrs. Smith. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” Lord Ermenwyr told them. “He’ll make it up to you. Won’t you, Variable Nincompoop?”

“Oh, drop dead again,” his brother replied. He looked at “Smith. “Seriously, though, is there anything I can do to help?”

Salesh in the aftermath of Festival is a quiet place.

Laughing Youth isn’t laughing as it shuffles along, wishing its golden sandals weren’t so bright. Don’t even ask about what Age is doing. It’s too gruesome.

City Warden Crossbrace had spent much of the last two days in a darkened alcove, so he found the sunlight painfully brilliant as he tottered up Front Street toward the Hotel Grandview. His uniform had the same wrinkles and creases it had had before he’d thrown it off, shortly after bidding Smith a good evening. His head felt curiously dented, and all in all he’d much rather have been home in bed. But a sense of duty drove him, as well as an awareness of the fact that corpses don’t keep forever and that the worse shape they were in when reported at last, the more questions would be asked.

Still, by the time he stepped through the Grandview’s street entrance, he was wondering how big around Copper-cut’s body was in relation to that nice capacious drainpipe, and how much of a bribe he might get out of Smith for suggesting that they just stuff the dead man down the pipe and forget he’d ever been there.

When his eyes had adjusted to the pleasant gloom of the lobby, he spotted Smith sitting at the desk, sipping from a mug of tea. He looked tired, but as though he felt better than Crossbrace.

“Morning, Crossbrace,” he said, in an offensively placid voice.

“Morning, Smith,” Crossbrace replied. “We may as well get down to business. What’ve you got for me?”

“Well, something surprising happened—” Smith began, just as Sharplin Coppercut strode into the lobby.

“You must be the City Warden,” he said. “Hello! I’m afraid I caused a fuss over nothing. Silly me, I forgot to tell anybody I occasionally go catatonic. I don’t know why it happens, but there you are. I was sitting in my lovely room enjoying the sunset and, bang! Next thing I know I’m waking up on a slab of ice in this good man’s storeroom. I was so embarrassed!”

Crossbrace blinked at him.

“You went catatonic?”

“Mm-hm.” Coppercut leaned back against the desk and folded his hands, with his thumbtips making jittery little circles around each other. He cocked a bright parrotlike eye at Crossbrace. “Crash, blank, I was gone.”

“But—” Even with the condition he was in, Crossbrace remained a Warden. “But in that case—why’d you write that note?”

“Note? What note?”

“That note you appeared to have been writing when you had your spell,” Smith said helpfully. “Remember that you’d sat down at the writing desk? It looked like you wrote Avenge My Murder.”

“Oh, that!” said Coppercut. “Well. I’m a writer, you know, and—I had this brilliant idea while I was eating, so I got up to write it down. It was—er—that I needed to get in touch with a friend of mine. Aven Gemymurd.”

“Of House Gemymurd in Mount Flame City?” Smith improvised.

“Yes! That’s it. They’re, er, not very well known. Secretive family. So it occurred to me they must have something to hide, you see?” Coppercut squinted his eyes, getting into his role. “So I thought I’d just visit my old friend Aven and see if I could dig up any dish on his family! Ha-ha.”

Crossbrace peered at him, still baffled.

“You look like you could use a cold drink, Crossbrace,” said Smith, setting down his tea mug and sliding out from behind the desk. “It’s nice and dark and cool in the bar.”

The hell with it, thought Crossbrace. “I’d like that,” he said. As he followed Smith to the bar, he addressed Copper-cut over his shoulder: “You know, sir, you might want to invest in one of those medical alert tattoos people get. It might save you from being tossed on a funeral pyre before your time.”

“Yes, I think I’ll do that,” said Coppercut, following them into the bar. “What a good idea! Because you know, Warden, that there are attempts on my life all the time, because I’m so widely hated, and anybody might make a mistake and think—”

“Coppercut?” A small scowling man appeared out of nowhere, twisting his mustaches. “You’re late for our interview. I was going to give you all kinds of trashy details about the life of my late father, remember?”

“Oh, that’s right!” exclaimed Coppercut, as the small man grabbed his elbow and steered him out of the bar. “How stupid of me—but I get like this, you know, when I’ve just waked up after a catatonic fit, very disorganized—nice meeting you, City Warden, sir!”

“So you got your Safety Certificate,” said Lord Ermenwyr with satisfaction, exhaling green smoke. “And the Variable Magnificent is safely on his way home.”

He was sitting with Smith and Mrs. Smith at their best terrace table, as they watched the first stars pinpricking out of the twilight. Like an earthbound echo, Crucible and Pinion moved from table to table lighting the lamps and oil heaters.

“I thought he couldn’t go home until he’d got enough money to pay back your lord father,” said Smith, dodging an elbow as Lord Ermenwyr’s bodyguards genuflected.

Lord Ermenwyr snickered.

“Much as he was looking forward to joining the Boys’ Own Street Corner Brigade, it doesn’t look as though it’ll be necessary. The late unlamented Mr. Coppercut carried his private accounts book with him, as it turns out. Had more gold socked away in the First Bank of Mount Flame than Freskin the Dictator! Eyrdway’s quite taken with pretending to be a famous scandalmonger. Plans to masquerade as Coppercut a bit longer.”

“Is that safe?” Mrs. Smith inquired. “Given the enemies Mr. Coppercut had?”

“Probably not,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “If he’s sensible, he’ll hit the bank first, pay back Daddy, then party the rest of the fortune away before anyone suspects he’s an imposter. That’s what I told him to do. Will he listen? Or will I run into him in some low bar in six months’ time, ragged and grotesquely daubed with cosmetics, vainly attempting to interest potential buyers? I can but hope.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke and smiled at it beatifically, as though he beheld a vision of fraternal degradation therein.

“You must have been horrible little children,” said Mrs. Smith, shaking her head.

“Utterly, dear Mrs. Smith.”

“Did your lord brother clean out your bathroom before he left?” Smith inquired cautiously.

“Of course he didn’t,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “He never cleans up any mess. That’s for law-abiding little shrimps like me, or so I was informed when I attempted to get him to at least take a sponge to the ring in the tub. I just smiled and offered him the contents of Mr. Coppercut’s traveling medicine chest. He was delighted, assuming it was full of recreational drugs. Since bothering to read labels is also only for law-abiding little shrimps, he’ll be unpleasantly surprised to learn that Mr. Coppercut suffered from chronic constipation.”

“So your bathroom…”

“Oh, don’t worry; I had the boys scrub down the walls. Only a medium could detect that anything unpleasant happened there now,” Lord Ermenwyr said.

“And the…”

“Got rid of them last night. We collected all the, er, odds and ends and crept down to your back area drain under cover of darkness. Dumped them in and pitched most of a barrel of Scourbrass’s Foaming Wonder in after them. Poof!” Lord Ermenwyr blew smoke to emphasize his point. “All gone, except for a couple of indignant shades, and I gave them directions to the closest resort in Paradise, with my profound apologies and a coupon for two free massages at the gym. But, Smith, I meant to ask you—where does that drain empty out?”

“Oh, not on the beach,” Smith assured him. “It goes straight into the sea.”

“You’re dumping sewage and caustic chemicals into the sea?” Lord Ermenwyr frowned.

“Everybody does,” said Smith.

“But… your people swim in that water. They catch fish in it.”

Smith shrugged. “The sea’s a big place. Maybe all the bad stuff sinks to the bottom? It’s never caused a problem for anybody.”

“And maybe you’re all being slowly poisoned, and you don’t realize it,” said Lord Ermenwyr. He looked panicked. “Nine Hells! I’ve been drinking oyster broth here!”

“Oh, it’s perfectly wholesome,” said Mrs. Smith.

“But don’t you see—” Lord Ermenwyr looked into their uncomprehending faces. He groaned. “No; no, you don’t. This is one of those cultural blind spots, isn’t it? Mother’s always on about this. She says you’ll all destroy yourselves one of these days with just this sort of heedlessness, and then Daddy says ‘Well, let them, and good riddance,’ and then they start to quarrel and everyone runs for cover. Look, you can’t just keep pouring poison into your ocean!”

“Well, where else can we put it?” Smith asked.

“Good question.” Lord Ermenwyr tapped ash from his smoking tube. “Hmm. I could ensorcel your sewage pipes so they dumped into another plane. Yes! Though, to do any real good, I’d need to put the same hocus on all the sewer pipes in town…”

“But then the sewage would just back up in somebody else’s plane,” Mrs. Smith pointed out.

“Unless I found a plane where the inhabitants liked sewage,” said Lord Ermenwyr, packing fresh weed into the tube and lighting it with a fireball. He puffed furiously, eyes narrowed in speculation. “This is going to take some planning.”

“I’m sure you’ll come up with something,” said Mrs. Smith. “I’d imagine your lady mother will be very proud of you.”

Lord Ermenwyr looked disconcerted at the idea.

Across the terrace, picking their way between the tables with some awkwardness because they seemed unable to let go of each other, came Willowspear and Burnbright.

“We need something,” said Burnbright.

“That is—with your permission, sir—” said Willowspear.

“What he wants to know is, there’s a dirt lot on the other side of the area where we keep the dustbins, and it’s got nothing but weeds on it now, so couldn’t we make a garden there?” said Burnbright. “To grow useful herbs and things? Him and me’d do all the work. I don’t know anything about gardening, but he does, so he’ll teach me, and that way we could have medicines without having to go to the shops in—in the quarter where Yendri live. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“I guess so,” said Smith.

“Ha! Just try it,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “The minute passersby spot a greenie planting exotic herbs here, there’ll be rampant rumors you’re growing poisons to kill off the good citizens of Salesh as part of a fiendish Yendri plot. You’ll get lynched.”

“No, we won’t!” said Burnbright. “You’re only saying that because I wouldn’t sleep with you, you nasty little man. If people come to Willowspear when they’re sick and his medicine makes them feel better, they won’t be afraid of him!”

“Of course they will, you delectable idiot. They’ll be intimidated by the idea that he has secret knowledge,” Lord Ermenwyr explained. “Evil mystic powers! Scary mumbo jumbo!”

“Not if they get used to him,” said Burnbright. Her eyes went wide with revelation. “That’s the whole problem, is that nobody ever really gets to know anybody else, but if they did, they’d see that other people aren’t so bad after all and a lot more like us than we thought and … and … sometimes everything you’ve been told your whole life is wrong!”

“You can’t change the world, child,” said Mrs. Smith.

“I’ll bet we can change some of it,” said Burnbright defiantly. “That bit with the weeds, anyway.”

“If we don’t try, how will anyone know whether it can be done?” said Willowspear to Mrs. Smith. She said nothing, watching as Burnbright gazed up at him in adoration.

“I’ll have Crucible get you some gardening tools,” said Smith.

“Thank you!” Burnbright threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

“You won’t regret it, sir,” Willowspear assured him, terribly earnest. He took Burnbright’s hand again.

They walked off together, into the fragrant twilight.

“A light, Mrs. Smith?” Lord Ermenwyr offered.

“Please.” She angled her smoking tube, and he caused a bright fireball to flash at its tip. Smith waved away multicolored smoke.

“The boy seems to have turned out well. I’m very much obliged to your lady mother,” Mrs. Smith told Lord Ermenwyr. He puffed and nodded, leaning back in his chair.

“You might have managed it yourself, you know, after all,” he replied. “You’ve practically raised Burnbright, wretched little guttersnipe that she is. Why?”

She gave him a hard level stare.

“Because it’s hard to let go of the past,” she said. “You keep hoping you can make the story turn out with a happier ending, even when you’ve learned better. If those two children can escape the doom in their blood, maybe all that death and agony wasn’t suffered for nothing. And…”

“And what?” Smith inquired.

Mrs. Smith set her hand on Smith’s. “She’s Kalyon Sunbolt’s daughter, Smith. If I had it to do all over again tomorrow, I’d die at his side. Gods don’t walk this earth very often, but one walked in him. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

She glanced across the terrace. Willowspear and Burnbright were poking around in the weeds behind the dustbin. The sound of their young voices floated back through the dusk as they made plans for their garden.

“ ‘FOREST denizens,’ ” says an angry voice.

“ ‘Beachhead of their race?’ ” says another.

“Their birthright!” says a third voice.

There is more muttered conversation in the darkness.

The stars wheel through the hours; the bright sun rises at last, and its slanting bars strike the wall where the real estate sign was pasted up only the day before. A city Night Warden, trudging home at last, stops and stares at the wall. From a crack in the pavement a green vine has sprouted and scaled the red stones with supernatural speed. It has thrust tendrils under the poster, spread and ripped and crumpled its fragments; and small green snails are crawling over what remains, greedily consuming the paper and its bright inks.

Smith looked broodingly through his guest ledger.

No question about it; bookings were down since the Month of the Sardine Runs. Business at the restaurant was better, but still less than what it had been formerly.

There were a lot of good reasons why, of course. Deliantiba and Blackrock were engaged in a civil war, which put something of a crimp in travel and trade along the coast; not many pleasure boats set out for vacation destinations when a warship was likely to attack first and sort out survivors later.

Also, the price of fish had skyrocketed lately, which drove up prices in the restaurants; and though it was common knowledge that there was no fish shortage, that it was all a plot by the fishermen to drive prices up, still the fish didn’t seem to have heard that and stayed out of their customary waters. And now the new trouble…

As if on cue, Crossbrace of the City Wardens walked into the lobby, accompanied by two of his lieutenants. He assumed a stiff formal stance and avoided Smith’s eyes as he said; “Citizen! In accordance with Salesh City Statute 1,135.75, all members of alien races are required to swear an oath of allegiance and obedience to Salesh City Law. They have within two days of notification to comply or file an appeal with the—”

“He already took the oath, Crossbrace, you know that—” began Smith in real annoyance. Crossbrace, still keeping his eyes averted, held up an admonitory finger.

“Ah! That was Salesh City Statute .63, you see?” he said in a normal tone of voice. “There’s a new oath they have to rake saying they won’t vandalize our property.”

“Oh.” Smith was still annoyed. “Well, did you have to bring an arrest squad with you?”

“It’s not an arrest squad,” Crossbrace protested, looking hurt. “We thought we’d give him an escort. In case there’s trouble. There has been trouble, you know.”

Smith knew, but he muttered to himself as he slid from behind the front desk and led the way out onto the hotel’s back terrace.

It was a nice place, a shaded garden with a dramatic view of the sea. Strange and gorgeous flowers bloomed in one area set apart by low stone balustrades. There six people stood with their faces turned to the sky, in various postures of rapture. They were all Children of the Sun. The seventh was not; and he was speaking to them, softly and encouragingly.

“…and think of your own mothers, or any woman who was ever kind to you: some part of Her was in their hearts. Focus your prayers on that ideal of love and reach out to Her—”

He noticed Smith and the wardens.

“—and She must hear you, and She will help you. Now, we’ll conclude for this afternoon; go home and continue the meditation exercise on Compassion.”

Willowspear walked quickly toward Smith, murmuring “What is it?” as his students moved like sleepers waking.

“You have to—”

“It’s my duty to inform you that—”

“What are the Wardens doing here?” demanded one of the students, shooting from Bliss to Righteous Indignation like a pistol bolt.

“You can’t harass our trevani!” cried another student, grabbing up a gardening tool, and Willowspear grimaced and held out his hands to them in a placatory gesture.

“Please! Consider the First Principle of Patience in the Face of Aggression!” he cried. Somebody muttered something about a Trowel in the Face of Oppression, but in the trembling moment of peace that followed Smith said quickly, “It’s just a new oath you have to take, saying you won’t commit any acts of vandalism. All right?”

“I’ll be glad to swear the oath,” said Willowspear at once.

“What in the Nine Hells is a trevani?” demanded one of the Wardens, scowling.

“Shut up,” Crossbrace told him.

“He’s teaching ’em to worship the Green Witch,” said the other Warden.

“The Green Saint! He’s teaching us the Way of the Unwearied Mother, you unenlightened dog!” shouted another student.

“Not very successfully, either!” Willowspear cried, turning to face his students. “Put the shovel down, Mr. Carbon. Don’t shame me, please. Go to your homes and meditate on the First Principle.”

His students filed from the garden, glaring at the Wardens, who glared back, and Willowspear sighed and pressed his slender hands to his temples.

“Forgive them,” he said. “May I take the oath here, Mr. Crossbrace?”

“We have to escort you to the Temple of Law for it,” said Crossbrace, shifting from foot to foot. “Because of the trouble, see?”

“All right.”

“And a couple of mine will go with you, how about that?” said Smith. The porters Crucible and Pinion, who had been watching in silence from the lobby doorway, stepped forward and flexed their big arms.

“That’d be capital!” said Crossbrace, with a ghastly attempt at heartiness. “Let’s all go now and get it over with, eh?”

“Right,” growled Pinion.

Smith saw them off, then went into the restaurant’s kitchen. Mrs. Smith was pounding spices in a mortar, and Burnbright was peeling apples. She was perched on a tall stool, rather precariously given her present condition, and there were shadows of exhaustion under her eyes.

“So I said to him, ‘Eight crowns for that puny thing? At that price it had bloody well better to be able to jump up and grant three wishes—’ ” Mrs. Smith paused to tip ash from her smoking tube into the sink, and saw Smith. In the moment of silence that followed, Burnbright looked up, looked from one to the other of them, and began to cry.

“Oh, oh, what’s happened now?” she wailed.

“He’s had to go down to the Temple of Law again,” Smith told her. “He won’t be long, though.”

“But he hasn’t done anything!” Burnbright wept. “Why can’t they leave us alone?”

“It’s just the way life is sometimes, child,” said Mrs. Smith, mechanically going to a cabinet and fetching out a bottle of Calming Syrup. She poured a spoonful, slipped it into Burnbright’s mouth between sobs, and had a gulp straight from the bottle herself. Having done that, she renewed her efforts with the mortar so forcefully that a bit of clove went shooting up and killed a fly on the ceiling.

“One goes through these dismal patches, now and again,” she continued grimly. “War. Economic disaster. Bestial stupidity on the part of one’s fellow creatures. Impertinent little men charging eight crowns for a week-old sardine. One learns to endure with grace.” Another particularly violent whack with the mortar sent a peppercorn flying. It hit the bottle of Calming Syrup with a ping, ricocheted off and narrowly missed Smith’s nose before vanishing out the doorway into the darkness of the hotel bar.

“He’ll be all right,” said Smith, patting Burnbright’s shoulder. “You’ll see. Everyone in this street will vouch for him—and after all, he’s married to you! So it’s not as though he could be ordered to leave the city or anything.”

Burnbright thought about that a moment before her lip began to tremble afresh.

“You mean they could do that?” she said. “With our baby coming and all?”

“Of course they couldn’t, child,” said Mrs. Smith, looking daggers at Smith and reaching for the Calming Syrup again. “We just told you so. Besides, he’s my son, isn’t he? And it’s my little grandbaby’s future at stake, isn’t it? And I’d like to see the City Factor foolhardy enough to throw miscegenation in my face.”

I wouldn’t, thought Smith, and exited quietly.

He heard the bell in the lobby summoning him. Someone was hammering away at it imperiously. He swore under his breath, wondering what else could go wrong with his day, or his week, or his life…

“Here he is! Oh, dear, doesn’t he look cross?” said Lord Ermenwyr brightly. “Ow! What was that for?”

“Because you’re an unsympathetic little beast, Master,” Balnshik told him, and held out her hand. “Smith, darling! How have you been these last few months?”

Smith gulped. His brain ground to a halt, his senses shifted gears.

He knew she was an ageless, deathless, deadly thing; but there she stood in a white beaded gown that glittered like frost, with a stole of white fox furs, and she was elegant and desirable beyond reason.

Beside her stood Lord Ermenwyr, looking sleek and healthy for a change, loudly dressed in the latest fashion. How anyone could wear black and still be loudly dressed was a mystery to Smith. The lordling’s hat bore some of the responsibility: it was a high sugar-loaf copatain, cockaded with a plume that swept the lobby’s chandelier. Beyond him were Cutt, Crish, Stabb, and Strangel, heavily laden with luggage.

“Uh—I’ve been fine,” Smith replied.

“Well, you look like you’ve been through a wringer,” Lord Ermenwyr said. “Never mind! Now I’m here, all will be joy and merriment. Boys, take the trunks up to my customary suite and unpack.”

They instantly obeyed, shuffling up the stairs like a city block on the move. Lord Ermenwyr looked Smith up and down.

“Business has been off a bit, has it? I shouldn’t be at all surprised. But you needn’t worry about me, at least! I’m simply here to relax and have a lovely time in dear old Salesh-by-the-Sea. Go to the theaters with Nursie dearest, visit the baths, sample the latest prostitutes—”

There was a rending crash from somewhere upstairs.

“Oh, bugger,” said Lord Ermenwyr, glancing upward. “We forgot to give them a room key, didn’t we?”

“I think poor Smith needs a cool drink on the terrace,” said Balnshik, running one hand through his hair. “Let’s all go. Fetch a bottle from the bar, Master.”

He had to admit he felt better, sitting out at one of the tables while Balnshik poured the wine. All his other problems shrank in comparison to the prospect of a few weeks’ visit by demons, even if they were pleasantly civilized ones. And Balnshik’s physical attentions were pleasant indeed, though they stopped abruptly when Burnbright and Mrs. Smith joined them on the terrace. Instantly, the ladies formed a tight huddle and locked into a private conversation whose subject was exclusively pregnancy.

Lord Ermenwyr regarded them narrowly, shrugged, and lit his smoking tube with a fireball.

“Tsk; they won’t even notice us for the next three hours, now, Smith. I suppose we’ll have to sit here and find manly things to talk about. I detest sports of any kind, and your politics don’t even remotely interest me, and the weather isn’t really a gender-specific topic, is it? How about business? Yes, do tell me how your business is going.”

Smith told him. He listened thoughtfully, exhaling smoke from time to time.

“…And then there’s the trouble in, in the quarter where the Yendri businesses are,” Smith continued. “I can’t understand it; everyone’s always gotten along here, but now… they’re all resentful and we’re all on edge. The bathhouse keepers are up in arms, by all the gods! Rioting herbalists! I don’t know where it will end, but it certainly isn’t good for keeping hotel rooms occupied.”

“Oh, I’ll book the whole damn place for the summer, if that’ll help,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “That’s the least of your worries. You know what’s behind all this, of course.”

“No,” said Smith, with a familiar sense of impending doom. “What’s behind it?”

“This stupid man Smallbrass and his Planned Community, naturally,” Lord Ermenwyr replied. “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen the signs! Or perhaps you haven’t. They’re being defaced as soon as they go up.”

“Oh. That place being built down the coast?” Smith blinked. “What about it? The Yendri always complain when we build another city, but it’s not as though we were hurting anybody. We’ve got to have someplace to live, haven’t we?”

“I don’t know that the other races sharing the world with you would necessarily agree,” said Lord Ermenwyr delicately.

“Well, all right. But why should they be so especially bothered now?”

Lord Ermenwyr looked at Smith from a certain distance, all the clever nastiness gone from his face. It was far more disconcerting than his usual repertory of unpleasant expressions.

“Perhaps I ought to explain something—” he began, and then both he and Smith were on their feet and staring across the garden at the hotel. There was shouting coming from the lobby, followed by the shatter of glass. Burnbright gave a little shriek that dopplered away from them as they ran, along with Mrs. Smith’s cry of, “Stay here and keep down, for gods’ sake!”

Smith, though older and heavier, got there first, for halfway through the garden Balnshik materialized in front of Lord Ermenwyr and arrested his progress with her formidable bosom. He hit it and bounced back, slightly stunned, and so Smith was the one to catch Willowspear as he staggered out into the garden. The Yendri was bleeding from a cut above one eye.

“It’s all right,” he gasped. “They ran away. But the front window is smashed—”

They haven’t been here two hours, and I’m already down a door and a window, said an exasperated little voice in the back of Smith’s head. Out loud he said, “Damn ’em anyway. Look, I’m sorry—”

“Oh, they weren’t your people,” Willowspear told him, pressing his palm to the cut to stop the bleeding. “They were Yendri, I’m afraid.”

“What in the Nine Hells did you do that for?” Lord Ermenwyr demanded of Balnshik. “I think I’ve got a rhinestone in my eye!”

“I’m under geas to protect you, Master,” she reminded him.

“Well, I’m supposed to protect anyone ever sworn to my service, and an oath is just as good as a geas any day—”

“Bloody greenies!” snarled Crucible, emerging from the lobby. “Are you all right, son?”

“Don’t call him a greenie!” cried Burnbright, who had finally struggled across the yard. “Oh, oh, he’s hurt!”

“Well, but he’s our greenie, and anyway it was the other damn greenies—”

“I’m fine,” Willowspear assured her, attempting to bow to Lord Ermenwyr. “It’s a scratch. My gracious lord, I trust you’re well? We were coming back up Front Street and we were accosted by three, er—”

“Members of the Yendri race,” supplied Smith helpfully.

“—who demanded to know what I was doing in the company of two, er—Children of the Sun, and wanted me to go with them to—I think it was to attend a protest meeting or something, and when I tried to explain—”

“They started chucking rocks at our heads,” said Pinion, dusting his hands as he stepped out to join them. “But halfway down the block the City Wardens caught sight of them and they took off, and the Wardens went after ’em like a gree—like something really fast. You want us to board up the window, boss?”

Fifteen minutes later they were back at their places on the terrace, somewhat shaken but not much the worse for wear. Balnshik had deftly salved and bandaged Willowspear’s cut, and he sat with a drink in one hand. Burnbright perched in his lap, clinging to him. Mrs. Smith had been puffing so furiously on her jade tube that she was veiled in smoke, like a mountain obscured by mist.

“But you’d be safe up there, you young fool,” she was telling Willowspear. She turned in appeal to Lord Ermenwyr. “You’re his liege lord or something, aren’t you? Can’t you tell him to go, for his own good?”

“Alas, I released him from his vows,” said Lord Ermenwyr solemnly. “Far be it from me to tell him that considerations of duty outweighed the vague promptings of a vision quest. Bet you’re sorry now, eh? Ow,” he added, almost absentmindedly, as Balnshik boxed his ear. “Besides, if a boy won’t listen to his own dear mother, whomever else will he heed?”

“I can’t go back to the Greenlands,” said Willowspear. “I’ve planted a garden here. I have students. I have patients. My child will be born a citizen of this city. I’m doing no one any harm; why shouldn’t I be safe?”

Mrs. Smith groaned and vanished in a fogbank of fume.

“And how would my love travel, so heavy laden?” Willowspear continued, looking down at Burnbright. “You can’t have our baby in the wilderness; not a little city girl like you. You’d be so frightened, my heart.”

“I’d go anywhere you wanted, if we had to,” she said, knuckling away her tears. “I was born in the wilderness, wasn’t I? And I wouldn’t be scared of the Master of the Mountain or anybody.”