“All right; Honorable Yirzol, you’re next,” Verkan Vall called out.
“The Lord Virzal has fired one shot,” one of the opposing seconds objected, “and Honorable Yirzol has a full magazine. The Lord Virzal should put in another magazine.”
“I grant him the advantage; let’s get on with it,” Verkan Vall said.
Yirzol of Narva advanced to the firing point. He was not afraid of death—none of the Akor-Neb people were; their language contained no word to express the concept of total and final extinction—and discarnation by gunshot was almost entirely painless. But he was beginning to suspect that he had made a fool of himself by getting into this affair, he had work in his present reincarnation which he wanted to finish, and his political party would suffer loss, both of his services and of prestige.
“Are you ready, gentlemen?” Klarnood intoned ritualistically. “You will not raise your pistols until the command to fire; you may fire at will after it. Ready, Fire!”
Verkan Vall shot Yirzol of Narva through the head before the latter had his pistol half raised. Yirzol fell forward on the splash of blood Sirzob had made, and the servants came forward and dragged his body over with the others. It reminded Verkan Vail of some sort of industrial assembly-line operation. He replaced the two expended rounds in his magazine with fresh ones and slid the pistol back into its holster. The two Assassins whose principals had been so expeditiously massacred were beginning to count up their losses and pay off the winners.
Klarnood, the President-General of the Society of Assassins, came over, hooking fingers and clapping shoulders with Verkan Vall.
“Lord Virzal, I’ve seen quite a few duels, but nothing quite like that,” he said. “You should have been an Assassin!”
That was a considerable compliment. Verkan Vall thanked him modestly.
“I’d like to talk to you privately,” the Assassin-President continued. “I think it’ll be worth your while if we have a few words together.”
Verkan Vall nodded. “My suite is on the fifteenth floor above; will that be all right?” He waited until the losers had finished settling their bets, then motioned to his own pair of Assassins.
As they emerged into the Martian Room again, the manager was waiting; he looked as though he were about to demand that Verkan Vall vacate his suite. However, when he saw the arm of the President-General of the Society of Assassins draped amicably over his guest’s shoulder, he came forward bowing and smiling.
“Larnorm, I want you to put five of your best Assassins to guarding the approaches to the Lord Virzal’s suite,” Klarnood told him. “I’ll send five more from Assassins’ Hall to replace them at their ordinary duties. And I’ll hold you responsible with your carnate existence for the Lord Virzal’s safety in this hotel. Understand?”
“Oh, yes, Honorable Assassin-President; you may trust me. The Lord Virzal will be perfectly safe.”
In Verkan Vall’s suite, above, Klarnood sat down and got out his pipe, filling it with tobacco lightly mixed with zerfa. To his surprise, he saw his host light a plain tobacco cigarette.
“Don’t you use zerfa?” he asked.
“Very little,” Verkan Vall replied. “I grow it. If you’d see the bums who hang around our drying sheds, on Venus, cadging rejected leaves and smoking themselves into a stupor, you’d be frugal in using it, too.”
Klarnood nodded. “You know, most men would want a pipe of fifty percent, or a straight zerfa cigarette, after what you’ve been through,” he said.
“I’d need something like that, to deaden my conscience, if I had one to deaden,” Verkan Vall said. “As it is, I feel like a murderer of babes. That overgrown fool, Marnark, handled his knife like a cow-butcher. The young fellow couldn’t handle a pistol at all. I suppose the old fellow, Sirzob, was a fair shot, but dropping him wasn’t any great feat of arms, either.”
Klarnood looked at him curiously for a moment. “You know,” he said, at length, “I believe you actually mean that. Well, until he met you, Marnark of Bashad was rated as the best knife-fighter in Darsh. Sirzob had ten dueling victories to his credit, and young Yirzol four.” He puffed slowly on his pipe. “I like you, Lord Virzal; a great Assassin was lost when you decided to reincarnate as a Venusian landowner. I’d hate to see you discarnated without proper warning. I take it you’re ignorant of the intricacies of Terran politics?”
“To a large extent, yes.”
“Well, do you know who those three men were?” When Verkan Vall shook his head, Klarnood continued: “Marnark was the son and right-hand associate of old Mirzark of Bashad, the Statisticalist Party leader. Sirzob of Abo was their propaganda director. And Yirzol of Narva was their leading socioeconomic theorist, and their candidate for Executive Chairman. In six minutes, with one knife thrust and two shots, you did the Statisticalist Party an injury second only to that done them by the young lady in whose name you were fighting. In two weeks, there will be a planetwide general election. As it stands, the Statisticalists have a majority of the seats in Parliament and on the Executive Council. As a result of your work and the Lady Dallona’s, they’ll lose that majority, and more, when the votes are tallied.”
“Is that another reason why you like me?” Verkan Vall asked.
“Unofficially, yes. As President-General of the Society of Assassins, I must be nonpolitical. The Society is rigidly so; if we let ourselves become involved, as an organization, in politics, we could control the System Government inside of five years, and we’d be wiped out of existence in fifty years by the very forces we sought to control,” Klarnood said. “But personally, I would like to see the Statisticalist Party destroyed. If they succeed in their program of socialization, the Society would be finished. A socialist state is, in its final development, an absolute, total, state; no total state can tolerate extralegal and para-governmental
