and I ran through our side of a three-way battle, looking rather silly as we lunged and leaped about, slicing the air. But when we repeated the sequence with Chris defending against our combined forces, it brought down the house, and we took several bows. I felt like an imposter. Only their skill kept me from being skewered several times during the performance. And we’d managed to make my nearly pinning my own foot to the floor look like just another part of the act. From the way Chris beamed at me, I deduced that I’d made fewer mistakes than he’d expected. I’d decide later whether to feel relieved or insulted.
“I’ll answer questions from the audience for the rest of the hour,” Chris announced, sitting down on the edge of the stage with the microphone in his hand.
I was tempted to hang around. I loved listening to Chris talk about swords and combat. For that matter, I’d have liked to hang around and hear what the mysterious Ichabod Dilley had to say. But I’d already abandoned poor Steele for most of the morning. So I snapped some pictures of Chris and headed back to the dealers’ room.
In the hallway, I saw small posses of Amazon guards and hotel staff, armed with ladders, nets, and heaps of fresh fruit, beginning the parrot and monkey roundup, accompanied by the scarlet jesters’ soulful rendition of “Git Along, Little Monkeys.” Probably my imagination, but the atmosphere already smelled fresher.
“Sorry,” I said, as I joined Steele in the booth. “Were things too crazy?”
He shook his head.
“Biggest problem has been keeping the vermin from filching the merchandise.”
“Vermin?” I said, looking around to see if anyone had heard. Not very tactful, referring to the convention goers that way. Or did he mean real vermin, I thought, peering down at my feet.
“Up there,” Steele said, pointing to the ceiling. Though the roundup had begun outside, the dealers’ room still had its contingent of escaped monkeys. Clusters of them hovered eagerly over our booth and those of two nearby jewelry makers. At least I assumed they were eager. Perhaps I’d feel differently if I were another monkey, but I couldn’t see that their expressions ever changed. I found it slightly unnerving to look up and see half a dozen solemn, impassive faces staring down as if in silent judgment of our strange human antics. The parrots, by contrast, always looked cheerful, eager, and friendly, even while biting you. Over time, no doubt, we could all learn parrot and monkey body language, but fortunately, thanks to the health department, they probably wouldn’t be around that long—although several other booths had already rigged makeshift canopies to protect their wares, an idea we might want to copy.
“Sorry I wasn’t here to help,” I said, turning back to Steele.
“They scatter if you wave a blade at them,” Steele said, with a shrug. “And apart from that, it’s been dead. Things get slow whenever there’s an interesting panel on.”
“Glad our panel counted as interesting.”
“I wouldn’t have minded seeing it,” he said, smiling as he ran his eyes up and down my costume. He wasn’t bothering to hide his appreciation, but he wasn’t being obnoxious about it, so I smiled back and turned to help the customer who’d just stepped in front of the booth.
We got enough traffic to keep from being bored. Not many people buying yet, but then people often took a while to work themselves up to the kind of major outlay required for a handmade sword or a piece of armor.
At one point, I saw the small man in the business suit wandering around as if shell-shocked. He stopped in front of our booth.
“Now you’re wearing a costume, too,” he said, in an accusing tone.
“Sorry,” I said. “It helps with sales.”
He looked at our merchandise.
“Swords,” he said. “Of course.”
“You don’t seem to be having a good time,” I said.
“Am I supposed to?” he asked.
Light dawned.
“You’re Ichabod Dilley, aren’t you?”
Chapter 9
The little man turned pale, and Steele looked startled.
“He can’t be Ichabod Dilley,” Steele said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“For one thing, isn’t he a little too young?”
“Maybe he wrote the comics as a teenager,” I said.
“In the womb, maybe,” Steele said. “Didn’t they come out in the late sixties or something?”
“Early seventies, actually,” I said.
“Wrote what?” the little man asked. He did look a little young, perhaps, but then he had the kind of bland, round face whose age I find hard to pin down.
“And now that he has gone on to a respectable corporate career, he isn’t sure he wants to be reminded of his wild and crazy youth,” I continued. “You are him, aren’t you?” I went on, turning back to the little man.
“I am named Ichabod Dilley,” he said. “But I’m not
“How can there possibly be two?” I asked.
“It’s a family name,” Dilley said. “I’ll have you know that there was an Ichabod Dilley who fought in the Revolution.”
“What do they call you, anyway?” Steele asked. “Icky?”
“I prefer Ichabod,” the little man said, sounding sulky.
He’d probably been called Icky more than once in his life.
“If you’re not the Ichabod Dilley who wrote the comic books, what are you doing here?” I asked.
“They invited me,” he said.
“And you didn’t find that odd? That a bunch of people you’d never heard of before invited you to be the special guest at a convention?”
“I speak at conventions all the time,” he said.
“What kind of conventions?”
“Any convention that hires me,” he said, drawing himself up very straight. “That’s what I do. I’m a motivational speaker.”
I managed to keep a straight face. Steele didn’t.
“Oh, that’s going to go over real big with this crowd,” he said, through snorts of laughter.
“Have you ever spoken to a group like this?” I asked.
“No, mostly I’ve done conventions of accountants and actuaries,” he said. “They’re a little more…um…”
“Buttoned up?” Steele suggested.
“You could say that,” Dilley said, glancing at two scantily clad Amazons strolling past the booth. “I did a convention of funeral directors, once.”
“I bet they were a load of laughs,” Steele said.
“Actually, they were, after the meetings,” Dilley said. “They really cut loose and get crazy at conventions. I don’t think I got to bed before midnight the whole weekend.”
If staying up till midnight was his idea of cutting loose and getting crazy, Amblyopia had some surprises in store for him. I’d already received two invitations to con parties that didn’t start till midnight.
Steele frowned, and I worried that he’d make another insulting remark about Dilley’s name, so I glanced up at the wall clock and pretended to be alarmed.
“Look at the time!” I exclaimed. “You’d better get over to the ballroom. It’s almost time for your panel.”
“Oh, right,” Dilley said, staring raptly at a woman walking toward the booth. Her barbarian warrior costume consisted of a few scraps of strategically positioned fur and a lot of leather straps holding her weapons.
She saw Dilley staring at her and smiled at him. He drew back as if she were a snake.
“This is crazy,” he muttered, and scurried away.
The barbarian woman glanced at our booth, favored Steele with a smile considerably warmer than the one
