The Anvil of the World

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.