“I know, but I was hoping we would show more profit this quarter.”
Guido stalked out of the office and into our anteroom. Through the door I watched him wrench the top off the low table in the center. He had had exactly the same thought I had. To the average visitor it would look like a fairly ordinary piece of furniture, but underneath the polished slab of wood lay a box about five feet square that was filled with coins, most of them silver or copper, many of them gold. They came from dozens if not hundreds of dimensions, profits not only from successfully completed missions, but our investments in several places, including the aforementioned casino. We used it as a slush fund. Any of the partners could grab a handful or a sackful of coins, no questions asked. Guido kicked the box. It let out a fat jingle as if it were too full to move.
“It’s all here, Miss Bunny,” he said. “How much you need? I can arrange to convey it all to anyplace that is to your desirin’.”
She smiled, but it was a wan expression.
“Thanks, Guido, that’s all right. I guess we have plenty.”
“Okay, Miss Bunny.”
Guido reassembled the table and stalked back to the office.
Aahz tipped me the kind of look that meant it was up to me to try to coax more information out of Bunny, but later on, if we were alone.
BAMF!
A whirlwind of green appeared out of nowhere and attached itself to me, lips first.
“Hello, tiger,” Tananda said. She was a Trollop, a female denizen of Trollia. She was curvaceous as Bunny but taller, and had long green silken tresses. Her costume consisted of the briefest, tightest trews and the lowest-cut jerkin possible, yet she still managed to pack an astonishing array of weapons and lock-picking devices within them.
“Hello, all!”
Behind her was her brother, Chumley. Unlike Trollops, Trolls were huge, lumpen, and covered with thick purple fur. Chumley possessed an intelligence that vied with his looks for which was the most fearsome.
“Is that mearcat back home again?” Bunny asked.
“Yes, although he took some persuading,” Tananda said.
“Which Little Sis was all too happy to provide,” Chumley said, proudly. He felt within the thick pelt of fur over his breastbone. “And I am reminded . . .” He produced two gold pieces and a silver piece, which jingled when he tossed them onto Bunny’s desk.
“Thank you,” Bunny said. She drew one of her ledgers to her and wrote a notation in one of the line items. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .” Aahz said, waving his coffee cup.
“You visited a ranch?” I asked, eagerly. “Here? In Deva? What do they raise there?”
“Figure of speech,” Aahz said, cutting off my questions. I shrugged. We lived in the same dimension, but I often felt as if Aahz had a much more interesting life than I did. “There’s a new Pervish restaurant in the Bazaar.”
“I know,” Guido said, wrinkling his nose. “People was wonderin’ exactly what died. And how many hundreds of ’em.”
I had sampled Pervish cooking in the past. The better-smelling dishes gave off an aroma like dragon’s dung. You had to stun some of the food with a spoon to keep it from crawling off the dish. Needless to say, the restaurants weren’t popular off Perv. When one opened in the Bazaar, it had to keep changing locations because of complaints it was driving customers away from nearby businesses.
“. . . I finally caught up with it near Lucky Mo’s Pawn Shop,” Aahz said, his brows lowering dangerously. “They make some pretty good vulopteroid soup. I had two or three bowls. If it doesn’t get chased out of the Bazaar completely I’m gonna make it my regular lunch stop.” He patted his belly and let out a hearty belch.
My stomach turned.
“What has dis got to do wit’ us?” Guido asked, the same thought in his mind as mine. “You’re not gonna ask us to dine out wit’ you. I don’t wanna hafta earn hazard pay.”
“Nah, it’s the guy I met when I was coming out of the café,” Aahz said. “Said he’s looking for help locating a fancy cup. He called it the Loving Cup.”
Bunny’s delicate red eyebrows lowered on her forehead.
“A cup is a small item,” she said. “Doesn’t he realize an interdimensional search for something like that would cost a fortune? Can he pay our fees?”
“Sounds like it. He’s got a few hundred gold pieces on him.”
“He wants you to look for a cup?” I asked. “Is it magikal?”
“So he says,” Aahz said, dismissively. He leaned back and put his feet up. “To do what he says it can would make it more than magikal. More like miraculous.”
“And what is that?” Bunny asked.
“It’s supposed to make the two people holding it come to permanent agreement. He needs it back for peace talks in his own dimension. His country and the five others surrounding it have been at war for hundreds of years. His king got them to the negotiating table, but the Loving Cup was the ace in the hole. He was going to use it to make the two biggest enemies swear eternal peace, but it was stolen right out of the conference chamber. Without it, things there are going to deteriorate in a hurry. In fact, he had to go back to his dimension and get back to the meeting. I took the job. I knew you’d want me to.” He fished in his pocket and came up with a handful of gold pieces. He stacked them on the arm of his chair. I counted ten coins, and my eyebrows rose. “I made him give me a deposit against expenses. Five percent.”
“That’s wonderful, Aahz!” Bunny said.
“Two hundred gold pieces?” I asked, my voice rising to a squeak. “He must be desperate. Or maybe crazy.”
Aahz grinned, showing all his teeth. “Desperate clients are the best kind. We negotiated for a while. He said it would be worth it if his country could stand down from a constant state of Defcon Two.”
“It’s too much! Especially for finding one little item like a cup.”
“If he’s ready to spend that kind of dough, I’m not going to say no.”
“Aahz, we’d be cheating him out of a small fortune.”
Aahz looked at me as if I were the crazy one.
“And you don’t think we’re worth it.”
“Not that much!”
“It does sound like a lot,” Bunny said, warily. We were allowed to accept assignments on behalf of M.Y.T.H., Inc., if we thought our skill set was up to the task. “And you’re sure that it would be something we can accomplish?”
“We stand a better chance than anyone else,” Aahz said.
“But looking for something small could take forever,” I pointed out. “Why are you interested in helping this guy?”
Aahz grinned.
That expression I knew, from playing cards with him and the others. It meant that he had at least one ace, if not Elves high.
“He said it was last seen in Winslow. That’d make it worth taking a look, anyhow.”
“Winslow?” The others beamed at Aahz.
“Winslow?” I echoed, bemused.
“The whole dimension’s a resort,” Aahz said. “A luxury establishment. Everything’s first class, especially the service. The concierges are trained never to say no to any request.”
“Tananda and I went there for a girls-only weekend a few months ago,” Bunny said, smiling. “Our tanning steward was a seriously cute guy.” She wriggled her shoulders, sending my heartbeat into a frenzy. “And pretty good with a tube of sunscreen.”
“Mmm-hm!” Tananda agreed. “Even at night.”
“I chased a perpetrator dere once,” Guido said, with an expression that spoke of fond remembrance. “If I wasn’t sentimentally attached to M.Y.T.H., Inc., I might’ve looked for a job there myself when my errand was completed.”
Brushing aside strange concepts like “tanning steward” and “sunscreen,” I tried to draw everyone
back to the proposal at hand.
“How do we locate something like a cup in an entire dimension devoted to pleasure and indulgence?” I asked.
Aahz smirked.
“Just look for people getting along a little too well,” he said.
CHAPTER TWO
“If you gotta ask, you can’t afford.”
—D. TRUMP
“People getting along a little too well” was not as useful a description for locating the Loving Cup in a place like Winslow. In Deva, accord would have been obvious, if not openly suspect. In Winslow, however, it seemed as if everyone was happy to be together.
We arrived just a couple of paces above the high-water mark on a white sand beach that stretched off toward the horizon in both directions. Though some people frolicked in the tossing waves of the turquoise-blue sea, couples from dozens of dimensions lay all around us on colorful squares of cloth. To the eyes of one brought up in a very small and rather parochial town, they appeared to be wearing the briefest of colorful underwear. I had encountered such swimming costumes before, naturally, when Bunny had participated in a beauty pageant.1 A Deveelish pair staring deeply into one another’s eyes had on garments of matching green floral pattern that actually complemented their natural red complexions. The same went for the Impish couple in red plaid that clashed violently with their pink skins, the Kobold duo exchanging tender emoticons who wore pristine white, and the Trollop who had on three tiny scraps of ivory cloth that did nothing to hide her very obvious charms, commanding the undivided attention of three enormous Trolls, a Pervect, and a Titan who towered over all the rest. None of those five males were shouting or trying to kill one another. They ought to have been trying to pound one another into the sand, but they were behaving in an unnaturally polite manner, even refilling each other’s drinks from a huge barrel within easy reach of the Pervect. I could not help but gawk. When I fell behind, Bunny reached back and seized my arm. I stumbled after her.
A very small Wyvern boy packed sand into a coral-colored pail with a tiny yellow spade and turned it upside down on top of a pillar consisting of several other cones he had already created. The whole mass shifted slightly, and an enormous slitted green eye larger than my head peered up at me from the sand only inches from my foot. I jumped backward, almost into Aahz’s arms. He set me on my feet, put one hand into the middle of my back, and pushed me forward. I tripped in the sand.
“Did you see that?” I exclaimed, as I regained my balance.
“Don’t draw attention,” Aahz said. As he passed the Wyvern child, he patted it on the head.
“But he’s burying a full-grown dragon!”
“It seems to like it,” Aahz said, showing his teeth in a massive grin. “I told you, this place does things to people.”
Gleep had already succumbed to the blissful mood permeating the atmosphere. At times he galloped along beside us, other times falling back to roll ecstatically in the sand or to nudge his head underneath the hands of people sitting on the beach. He thundered back to me and slurped me with an enthusiastic tongue. Then he hurtled up the beach again.
As I often heard in our desert home in Deva, it wasn’t the heat that was hard to take, it was the humidity. My clothing was much too heavy for the Winslow climate. I tugged at the sodden collar of my shirt as I trudged up the incline of white sand from the sea’s edge. I felt downward for the nearest of the force lines I could sense under our feet. It was a hugely powerful, yellow-white line as sinuous as a strangle-snake. Better to fill up my internal supply of magik in case we needed it. Enormous though the source appeared to be, I could drain only a small amount at a time, as if the whole river of power were already spoken for. I did what I could. Once I had some magik on board, I was able to cool myself off. Only then could I appreciate the real beauty of the dimension.
Not surprisingly, once the rest of my partners heard that we had a mission on Winslow, every one of them volunteered to help seek out the Loving Cup. Pookie, Aahz’s cousin, and Spyder, her Klahdish colleague, were on another job and had to opt out. Guido and Nunzio, to their open disappointment, had to do a follow-up on a mission they had completed the previous week.
“The client has, sorta, forgotten to complete his financial obligation to us,” as Guido put it, with admirable delicacy. “It therefore behooves us to remind him a little.”
Tananda and Chumley, on the other hand, had no previous engagements. The sister and brother from Trollia raced one another up the beach, laughing and throwing handfuls of sand at one another. Tananda wore a tiny swimsuit that matched her marvelous tumbling green tresses. As much as I admired and trusted Tananda as a partner in M.Y.T.H., Inc., I could never forget that she was also an accomplished thief—far better than I had ever aspired to be—as well as a retired (I hoped) assassin. Chumley, in his nom de guerre of Big Crunch, tended to loom threateningly in public. Not difficult, since he was an eight-foot behemoth with odd-sized moon-shaped eyes. Yet in Winslow, he seemed free to enjoy himself. His huge laugh echoed over the sound of the waves. He had described his attire as “board shorts,” though I couldn’t see where the board fitted in the flower-printed cutoff trousers.
A further addition to the party was Markie. Her pink suit was trimmed with an abbreviated skirt of lilac. She carried a pail and a spade to match. A denizen of Cupy, she resembled a small and immature Klahd, a useful disguise in many cases. In fact, her diminutive appearance had fooled me and my partners.2 Though she would never be a full partner in M.Y.T.H., Inc., she had helped us out on some occasions. Her elemental powers were good to have in a pinch. Though, considering what the others had said about Winslow, I doubted if we were going to need them. Winslow was just too . . . nice.
A blue-scaled male with a very round head and tiny round ears wearing only a white waistcoat flapping open over his narrow chest, a white bow tie, and white shorts came running up to me and brandished a small circular tray. On it were balanced stemmed glasses filled with liquid about the same color as his skin. He wore a name tag that said Filup.
“Cocktail, sir?” he asked.
The drinks looked inviting. Condensation on the surface of the beakers just cried out to tell me how good they would feel clutched in my hot and sweaty palms.
“Uh, how much for a round for me and my friends?” I asked.
The waiter seemed shocked. “There’s no charge, sir! This is an all-inclusive dimension.”
“But we haven’t paid anything yet.”
He smiled at me. His eyes were round and lidless like those of a fish but somehow still expressed friendliness and deference.
“Our rates are very attractive, and you’ll be delighted to know that we have several specials running right now. In fact, there is a promotion for parties of seven! Three gold pieces per person per day!”
“Ouch.” I winced. I had done jobs on behalf of M.Y.T.H., Inc., that paid a single gold piece for several days’ work. “That’s awfully high. Could you do any better for us? We are a large group, as you noticed.”
“Sir, that is a very fine deal,” the waiter said, looking a trifle hurt. “Our usual rates are quite a bit higher.”
“Sounds good to me,” Aahz said.
I turned to look at him in shock. Aahz never let go of a coin unless he was forced to. I wondered if the atmosphere of Winslow was affecting his brain. He didn’t seem impaired, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to tell.
“Aahz, he said three gold pieces a day! Each!”
“The client’s picking up expenses, remember?” Aahz said, pushing me aside. “We’ll take your deal, my good man. Now, how about that cocktail? If you have something to drink from that’s larger than a thimble.”
“But of course, sir!” the waiter said, looking even more pleased than before. He snapped his fingers. A being of the same species but shorter and stockier came running up. Dangling from his hand was a glass pail. It was filled with the same brilliant b
lue liquid. “The Pervect aperitif,” our server explained.
“That’ll do for a start,” Aahz said. He took the bucket in both hands and glugged down the contents. When he lowered the container, it was empty. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Aaah! My compliments to the mixologist! But that just barely wet my whistle . . .”
Before Aahz had finished voicing the thought, yet another small fish-scaled waiter ran up and swapped the empty for the sloshing pail in his other hand. Aahz gave a broad grin that showed all of his teeth. He accepted the fresh drink and took a healthy swig. The first server offered Bunny and me glasses brimming with blue liquid, then trudged up the beach to serve Chumley and Tananda. Yet another server materialized to put a bowl in front of Gleep. My dragon began to slurp happily at the contents. Markie got a tall glass with a bright red cherry clinging to the rim.
I sipped from the glass. The beverage packed a wallop, but only in flavor. It tasted spicy, fresh, and fruity all at the same time, yet I could sense only a touch of alcohol. I could have several of this cocktail without my judgment becoming impaired. I wondered whether Aahz’s bucketfuls were similarly harmless, but I doubted it. He hated watered-down drinks and would have told the waiter off for trying to foist any on him. It seemed that the powers that oversaw Winslow were able to tailor their offerings on a personal level. Perhaps we were going to get our three gold pieces’ worth in thoughtful attention. I was deeply impressed.
With my drink in my hand, I looked around. The sand was full of sunbathers. Though a number of the blue-skinned servers plied the crowd with beverages and snacks, I couldn’t see a bar or inn that provided them. I kept an eye on one waiter until his tray was empty. He stepped away from the last patron and vanished silently. It was a nice trick. I wondered if I could learn how to do it. The only disappearance spells I knew were noisy. For what we had agreed to pay per day, I was pretty sure I could leverage some magik lessons from the staff.
Robert Asprin's Myth-Fits Page 2
