One Quest, Hold the Dragons

by Greg Costikyan

  "Taking it to Arst-Kara-Morn?" said Stantz, still scanning the file. "My good man, how absurd!"

  "How did you know that?" Sidney demanded.

  Stantz looked up, smiling faintly. "We do have our sources, my dear," he said. "Sir Ethelred of Athelstan may think he has the finest espionage establishment in the human lands, but he is in error."

  "You have a spy in the Athelstani Foreign Ministry?" said Jasper.

  Stantz blinked. "Do you expect me to comment?" he asked. "Take it to Arst-Kara-Morn? Suppose the Dark Lord captures it? Idiotic idea."

  "See here," said Timaeus, somewhat angrily, "it's no concern of yours. It belongs to us; the Lord Mayor has specifically ordered you to surrender it to us; we demand it. If you don't have it, the least you can do is tell us who's got it, why, and how we can get it back."

  "The Lord Mayor specifically ordered?" said Stantz. "Is that so, Ren?"

  Wolfe cleared her throat. "Yup," she said.

  Stantz frowned. "Well, well, well," he said. "Damn." He wheeled his chair over to one of the speaking tubes, and uncapped it. "Kant!" he shouted down it. "Are you there?"

  He put his ear to the tube and listened briefly, then put his mouth to it again. "Kant! The statue! Did they pick it up?"

  "Did who pick it up?" Sidney demanded, but Stantz shushed her as he put his ear to the tube again.

  "Damn," he said to himself as he listened. "At what time?" he shouted, then frowned at the response. "Thank you, Kant!"

  He moved to another tube, uncapped it, and shouted, "Bleichroder! Immediate message to the Alcalan frontier! Are you there, dammit, Bleichroder? Yes, good. Halt all elven travelers. Search possessions for a life-size statue of a human male, cast of athenor Yes, athenor, dammit, Bleichroder At once! By crystal, of course. Good. Thank you. "

  He wheeled back to his desk. "We'll try to recover it, of course," he said, "but I suspect it's unlikely—"

  Everyone started babbling at once. For long minutes, there was pandemonium. At last, Sidney shouted, "Shut up!"

  And miraculously, there was silence.

  "To whom did you give it?" Sidney demanded.

  "The elves," said Stantz.

  "Why?" asked Sidney.

  Stantz shrugged. "They asked for it," he said.

  Sidney snorted. "If an orc had wandered in off the street and asked for it, would you have said, `Sure, here it is, my compliments to the Dark Lord'?"

  "No, of course not," said Stantz in irritation. "But why not give it to the elves?"

  "Why should you give it to the elves?" Sidney demanded.

  Stantz spread his hands. "It's a hot potato," he said. "Look what chaos it's wrought in Hamsterburg; if I kept it, seventy-three discrete political factions would start plotting to get it away from me. Getting rid of it seemed like an excellent idea."

  "But what do the elves want with it?" asked Timaeus plaintively.

  No one had an answer for that.

  After a long silence, Frer Mortise cleared his throat. "Well," he said, "I've always wanted to visit the elven domains."

  "1 haven't," said Jasper nastily.

  "Twinkle-toed little snots," snarled Nick.

  It was hard, thought the lich as it drove its horse to the limit of endurance, to know which was the more otiose: the normal, everyday tedium of humdrum existence, or the occasional bursts of desperate activity continued survival required.

  It didn't know why it bothered. Continued survival hardly seemed worth the bother. The true death would be almost welcome.

  Although, it reflected, the terrified horse's hooves pounding recklessly across some poor peasant's field, smashing sprouting wheat to the earth, the difficulty with Dark Lords was that they wouldn't let you stay dead. Its own existence was testimony to that. It was compelled to action not so much by the need to survive as by the need to avoid spending the next millennium at the bottom of a dungheap, say, or functioning as a birdfeeder. It had spent three centuries as a birdfeeder once, its skull affixed to a post and filled with seed, and it still had a strong urge to smash songbirds into bloody pulp whenever it heard them.

  Arst-Kara-Morn was a lot bigger on the stick than the carrot.

  Some peasant came running out of a shack, waving a sickle and cursing. He ran to intercept the lich's horse, whose hooves were pounding the peasant's crop to mud. The lich pulled back its cowl.

  Its skull grinned emptily in the daylight. The peasant's eyes went wide in fear; he stumbled away from the horse in terror.

  It should never, thought the lich, have allowed von Grentz to keep the statue. How quickly the fool had lost it! And now the elves had it.

  It had a chance, albeit a slight one, a chance of getting it away from them.

  And presenting it on a platter to the Dark Lord. That would save its bacon.

  Not that it had any bacon to speak o£ Or anything in the way of meat, actually. Meat rots. Bones last a little longer.

  Too long by half, it mused glumly.

  The horse stumbled, slowed, collapsed to the ground. The lich jumped lithely from its back, then went to examine the beast.

  It was dying, heart burst from its exertion.

  Casually, the lich drained the last of its life energy, then went to look for another creature to run into exhaustion.

  The, Um, Intermezzo