The Wizard of Karres

Pausert wasn't fooled. She was thinking about it! He tried to imagine it. Hulik do Eldel, in a little house, behind a desk. Maybe even married, and with children!

Great Patham! What would any children she raised be like? Worse than young witches, even, probably wreaking havoc on their kindergarten, playing 'pirates and hostages' with real Blythe guns, breaking into the creche offices at night to rifle through the teacher's desk, looking for blackmail material . . .

'It wouldn't suit you,' he said firmly. 'You'd be bored before the first day was over.'

'You're probably right,' she replied, still sounding wistful. 'Still, with the right set of circumstances, the right job, and the right partner . . .'

 

CHAPTER 17

'We're getting closer,' said Sedmon to Sedmon. 'At Hanson's Reach we missed them by weeks. Maybe we can catch up finally on Tornam.'

'Provided we don't have to clean up any more messes along the way,' cautioned the second Sedmon. 'Eliminating Imperial agents is a dangerous pastime.'

The first Sedmon shrugged. 'He was too curious as to why we wanted descriptions of the cast of the Petey Byrum and Keep. The lattice ships do get watched. They're good cover, mind you. I think we need to look into investing in one, someday.'

* * *

The Sedmons back on Uldune nodded. 'The records here indicate that several of them are considerably indebted to our bank. And the one we're following is in financial difficulty.'

'The records we've looked at indicate this to be the norm. They're potentially profitable, of course, but it's usually the debt load that cripples them. And a lot of the showmen seem to have the financial acumen of a Humpity. But this Himbo Petey seems a cut above most. Our contact with the Imperial Bank of Credit and Commercial Ventures does indicate that he's been trying to bring it under control.'

* * *

All of the Sedmons knew they were avoiding thinking about how they would deal with meeting up with Hulik do Eldel. Like almost all of the Daal's citizens, she was blissfully unaware that she'd actually met, physically, four different bodies. The same mind, of course.

At one stage, when they'd first begun considering a personal liaison with the Imperial agent, the hexaperson had assumed they would conduct it the same way as they dealt with the people of Uldune—with one of them on display and the rest in reserve, in hiding. But as time went on, and the do Eldel grew more central to their thoughts, the thought of deceiving her became distasteful. Besides, as intelligent and capable as Hulik was, it would probably be futile as well. Even though the Daal had kept a certain distance from her in the past, he suspected that she had already guessed at least part of the truth.

But they'd deal with that issue once they caught up with her. First, they had to do that.

 

CHAPTER 18

At long last, Pausert relled vatch. And he could tell that this was a vatch that he had relled before. Goth relled it at the same time, and looked up sharply. 'Is that our old friend, Captain?'

A patch of misty black blinked silver-slitted eyes at him. 'I believe it is.'

Hello, Real Thing. Are you going off to be stories for the waking-dreamers now?

As a matter of fact, we are. He did not ask where the vatch had been. Truth to tell, he wasn't sure he really wanted to know.

Good.

Are you planning on luring more victims here? he asked cautiously.

Not now.

'Time, Goth,' he said, and Goth put away her headphones with a sigh. They looked as if they were plugged into her personal player; they were, and they weren't, because one of the channels on her personal player was set to scan all the com that was coming from inside the Petey B as relayed from the Venture.

'Still nothing,' she complained.

'Cheer up. After this show, we lift—and even if they've been reporting to someone in person, they won't be able to do that anymore.' They now had the third of their plays, the Scottish Play, in production, and Sir Richard had elected to put off beginning rehearsal for the fourth until they were back in space.

The new man was working out well enough. True to his word, Vonard Kleesp was awake and ready for first rehearsal and he never showed the least bit of unsteadiness from that moment until final curtain. Though, as Vezzarn said with reluctant admiration, 'what he drinks in a night would kill five men.' Presumably he'd gotten to that stage of alcoholism where the alcoholic could not function without liquor in his system.

Besides, Pausert had overheard Cravan saying to Ethulassia one night they only needed Vonard Kleesp until Ken Kanchen was all healed up.

'You won't fire him?' Ethulassia had asked anxiously. 'He's a superb actor, whatever else.' Her voice seemed to get a little dreamy. 'Quite a charming and handsome man, too, for that matter. And he doesn't really drink as much as people think. With my personal intervention . . .'

'No, I certainly won't fire him,' Cravan had replied. 'He'll be useful if Pausert leaves us. He can take those roles; for that matter, he could double and stand-in on just about every male lead we do. But he won't be indispensable, and when something happens to him, it won't leave us short.'

When . . .

Well, Cravan was right to use that word. Drinking like that, a man's liver would only last so long and his heart would probably go even sooner. Medics could give you artificial organs, but if you collapsed with heart or liver failure out in space or some backwater world in the middle of nowhere, you might not live to make it to a place where they could install one.

'Well, little Wisdom,' Pausert said teasingly, 'time to go be a Witch.'

'Very well, Your Majesty,' she mocked him back.

Oh, good. A story I haven't seen!

It was a good thing that Pausert's time on stage as King Duncan was limited; the vatch was full of questions. Some of them Pausert couldn't answer, such as the very reasonable question of, if the Witches were so powerful, why didn't Macbeth keep them around to show him the future all the time? 'I don't know; I guess it's just the way the story-maker wanted it,' was all he could say. The vatch didn't seem to mind that he didn't know, and best of all, it behaved like a mannerly child at a grown-up party.

But as the play hurtled towards its conclusion, he began to get a prickling at the back of his neck. Then Vonard Kleesp appeared at his side, coming from the direction of the dressing rooms.

'Something's amiss, I think,' he whispered into Pausert's ear. 'I was just coming out of my dressing room and saw a man I don't recognize going into yours. I don't believe he was alone, either. I notified some of the stagehands, but you might want to look into it yourself.'

Trouble! said the vatch suddenly, and with great glee. This'll be fun!

And it vanished.

Standing backstage as he was, Pausert could hear the vatch's 'fun' as a series of crashes and muffled shouts. Things were falling over—or being knocked over—onto several people who had been, he suspected, trying to sneak around backstage. The vatch had put paid to that particular plan, though. And now, even as the shouts got louder, Pausert saw several burly stagehands converging on the area.

Fortunately, by that point, the final sword fight between Macbeth and Macduff was in full swing. You could probably have staged a barfight backstage without anyone in the audience noticing.

The noises stopped at the point where Macduff killed Macbeth, and the stagehands returned, dusting their hands in satisfaction.