so, and promptly.
The Merchants Association had been happy to take us on a midnight magic-carpet tour of available properties. I had rejected outright an otherwise desirable six-room storefront with a courtyard garden inside for Gleep and Buttercup to play in, mainly because it stood directly be-side one of the Bazaar's busiest brothels. Not that I had anything against people in professional horizontal work, but the clients waiting to be interviewed by the majordomo had begun to size up Bunny as new talent. I didn't want any misunderstandings, so I had turned the place down on the spot and dragged Bunny away before she could ask why. Only a moment later she came to the same conclusion I had and gave our tour guides a fierce glare. They had the grace to look sheepish, not an easy task for Deveels, who were born with a greater capacity for gall than maybe any-one but Pervects.
The next two showplaces were frankly insults. The property next to the arena selling dragons had fallen va-cant, to no one's surprise. It always emptied out at the end of every lease, no matter how desperate the tenant. I couldn't even consider it. The noise and the smell alone would have put off clients, let alone the danger of running into some of the merchandise if it ever got loose. And it would have. Deveels had a tendency to cause havoc among people they see as having money they wish to acquire, and set up “accidents,” which they then blame loudly on the moneyed individual, the only remedy for which was a hefty load of cash. It had happened to me enough times to make me wary. I looked over the burn marks on the wall of the stand that faced the dragon lot. “No,” I had said flatly.
One of the Deveels showing us the property sulked openly. I assumed he had a financial interest in the dragon booth and had had visions of gold coins dancing in his brain.
The second one, only a block away, had nothing to re-deem it either. The modest tent faced away and was invis-ible from a busy corner not a dozen paces distant.
“Too subtle,” Bunny had said. “The Great Skeeve needs a place with more pizzazz. More eyeballs.” She had whipped Bytina, her Perfectly Darling Assistant, her handbag, and ordered up a map of the Bazaar. She indicated a few points on the map to the representatives.
“What have you got in these areas?” she asked.
With a sigh, our guides directed the Djinn driving the carpet in an easterly direction, toward the faint fingers of light heralding false dawn.
Location, location, location, as Catchmeier, the real-estate Deveel, kept reciting to us, as if repetition made it truer than anything else he said. Just before the sun came up, we landed in front of a tent I wouldn't have looked twice at if I'd been on my own. To my surprise, it lay across a busy passageway from the Golden Crescent Inn, one of my favorite eateries, a reliable spot for private con-ferences, and workplace of some of my closest friends in the Bazaar who didn't work for me. The rental property lay just exactly at the angle one's glance would fall on as one came around the corner of yet another throughway, one that even at this early hour was full of carts and foot traf-fic. It had looked promising, even to my increasingly bleary eyes.
“It's got all the comforts of home,” Catchmeier said, holding aside the flap of the tent. I peered inside. The de-cor in the transdimensional building concealed by the magikal portal hadn't been updated in years, maybe not since the spell was laid, but I couldn't see anything basi-cally wrong with it. I got a glance of tired walls painted in faded designer beige, worn wooden floors, and bat-tered lintels between rooms. '“Skylights in the two main rooms. Outhouse out the back. Regular trash pickup. Safe neighborhoodhardly any murders in the last ten years. Well, the last two anyhow. Last two months,” he admitted at last. “What do you think?”
Bunny and I looked at one another. “We'll take it,” she'd said. The Deveels and the Djinn driver looked re-lieved.
“Just come with me,” Catchmeier had said. “We'll have the paperwork drawn up for you in no time. No trouble.”
No trouble. Hah. I turned over the second-to-last page, to make sure all the changes we had agreed on were presentthis time. A scurry of thin black lines caught my eye. I turned back the page in haste. A clause in very fine print was trying to avoid my eye. I slapped my hand down on it and read through my fingers, shifting them so I could finish without it getting away. Catchmeier had inserted a transitive clause, one that would make me liable for dam-ages for any accidents within a
