incongruous with its silly name. I had been there once during the fall, I seemed to remember. I recalled that I had even chatted with the proprietor, a short, stocky man with an exceptionally thick crop of chestnut hair. At that time I wasn’t yet wearing the Mantle of Death, and I wasn’t constantly being bombarded with polite, strained smiles and terrified looks.
I went upstairs. If only Lady Tanita had known that, without her, I was as scared as a child whose parents risk leaving him alone for the first time to go to the movies! But there was nothing I could do about it.
I threw open the door to the bedroom with a heavy heart. My nose was greeted by a smell of tasty food so unexpected that I froze in my tracks. Then I groped around for the light switch. A warm orange light filled the room. Here in Echo, special glowing mushrooms are often used for lighting streets and interiors. They multiply eagerly in special vessels like lampshades. The trick is that the mushrooms begin to shine when something irritates them. The light switch sets brushes in motion that gently but insistently tickle the mushrooms caps. They react instantaneously.
The orange hue of the angry mushrooms doesn’t appeal to everyone. Many esthetes prefer candles, or spheres with glowing blue gas. Sir Juffin Hully is partial to the latter. I got used to blue light when I lived with him, and I acquired the same kind of spheres for my own living quarters. But now the orange illumination also seemed sweet to me; the people who lived here thought so, too, apparently.
Thus, the mushrooms worked themselves into a temper, and I was able to glance around.
Something was lying in the middle of the fluffy carpet among the scattered blankets. That something was indeed dressed in garb resembling pajamas—a roomy skaba made of soft fabric. I had never taught myself to use this unappealing garment. To romp around in a skaba and looxi, that was one thing. But to sleep in a shapeless parachute of a thing that looked like your grandmother’s nightgown—excuse me! That was asking too much. And in a good bed, one must sleep in one’s birthday suit—a time-tested rule.
The mysterious “something” clearly belonged to the opposing camp, since it was wearing pajamas. Its resemblance to a human being seemed to stop there, however. In front of me was a real piece of meat, well- cooked and appetizing. It gave off a dizzying, tantalizing, and vaguely familiar aroma.
I inched closer. This was very trying on the nerves. I almost got sick, despite the wonderful aroma. The meat really did have the wretched face of a human being. The remains of its features were encircled by a halo of chestnut curls that even I recognized as belonging to Karwen, though I had only once laid eyes on him. Lady Tanita was right. There were no grounds for hoping otherwise.
“Sinning Magicians,” I exclaimed aloud. “Now what am I supposed to do!”
I went down to the living room, entered the dark restaurant, and poured myself a full glass of the contents of the first bottle I grabbed. I couldn’t make out the name of the drink in the darkness, but the taste wasn’t too bad. Then I stuffed my pipe with tobacco. The taste of the local tobacco didn’t matter at all—under the circumstances, it was better than nothing.
I sat alone at the bar in the light cast by the dim orange nimbus of the streetlight, sipping the anonymous drink, and smoked. This simple ritual was enough to restore some semblance of order to my thoughts. I realized there was no need to bother Melifaro, and especially not Sir Juffin. Let them catch up on their sleep. I’m not such a moron that I can’t handle these routine matters. It’s my job, after all.
Having resolved my moral deliberations, I went back to the bedroom. The tantalizing smell again seemed familiar to me. Where could I have smelled it before? Not in the
Abandoning this olfactory wild-goose chase, I dug into my pockets for the dagger. The gauge mounted on the handle showed evidence of magic of the second degree. This was not only officially permitted, but also absolutely logical, since I was in the presence of the remains of a restaurant proprietor. And who is more adept at practicing permissible Black Magic than a chef? This modest degree of conjuration, in my humble opinion, was nowhere near potent enough to transform a human being into something like what I saw before me. Fine, we’d deal with that question later. Now I had to remove the body to the House by the Bridge, I reasoned, because that was the proper procedure. Further, I couldn’t bear thinking of that abomination in the marital bower. Sooner or later the sweet Lady Tanita would return. What an incompetent figure I’d cut if she had to see that gruesome piece of meat again!
It wasn’t that I felt sorry for this woman, nor could what I experienced have been called pity. It was just that everything that had happened to her seemed to be happening to me, as well. Lady Tanita’s sorrows washed over me like the sound of a television blaring in the next room. It wasn’t inside me, but I couldn’t escape it. In short, I experienced in the flesh the literal meaning of “empathy.”
There is nothing simpler than carrying out the impossible. You just have to imagine what you must do, and turn your mind off completely. When you come to your senses, everything is already behind you.
I swear by the World that when I was wrapping the piece of meat in the blanket, I felt not a shred of emotion. I didn’t feel anything later, either, when I was enacting my favorite trick, as a result of which the disgusting mummy fit between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. And while I was walking through the empty city to the House by the Bridge, my feelings were dormant, as though some part of myself, tender and vulnerable, had been put into cold storage until better times.
When I reached the Ministry, I wondered where I should unload my burden. Perhaps in the small, dark chamber, thoroughly insulated from the rest of the world, where material evidence was stored? Or in one of the chilly, spacious basement rooms that served as the morgue and were nearly always empty? I was so perplexed about this dilemma that I decided to consult Kurush.
“If you’re sure that this was once a person, it can only be a corpse,” said the wise bird.
I felt relieved. Here was some degree of certainty, in any case.
Only after the aromatic corpse was on the stone floor did I allow myself to become a bundle of nerves again.
I went to wash my hands. I washed them for a full half hour, scraping away at the skin with my fingernails.
After this ritual purification on my upper extremities, I felt better and went back to the office.
“An auspicious End of the Year, eh?” I said, winking at Kurush. “A visit from a beautiful damsel and a mountain of food.”
“Are you serious, Max?” asked the buriwok cautiously. “I don’t think you can eat that. In fact, people are constantly eating all kinds of junk they shouldn’t.”
“Of course I’m joking,” I said, petting the bird’s soft feathers. “Do you know whether there’s any good kamra left over around here, Kurush? The kind I didn’t make, that is?”
“In Melifaro’s office there’s most likely a whole jug of it,” the buriwok replied. “I saw them bring it in, and I know the master of the office left a few minutes later. They also had pastries with them, so who knows.”
“Great.”
I catapulted headlong into the office of my “daylight half.” On the table I found a jug of kamra and several pastries. The fellow had been so eager to return to his home, now emptied of relatives, that he didn’t bother to finish the treats, though at his habitual rate of consumption they should have been gone in seconds flat, so Kurush and I were in luck. We were unlikely to reach the ever-hospitable Madame Zizinda with a call. Any other time or season, sure, but not the Last Night of the Year.
Toward morning, I managed not only to drink all the kamra and help Kurush clean the sticky cream off his beak, I did more: I drew up a plan of action. I was ready to accept the challenge, in the spirit of Melamori and her gambling fever. It was the first time in my professional life that I had been on a case from the word go. With all my heart I wanted to see it through to the end, and to do everything properly. Naturally, there could be no thought of dealing with it all on my own. That wasn’t necessary. But I felt that when Juffin arrived, I simply had to greet him, not only with the news of the sordid case, but also with an aim to solving it.
Juffin, it seemed, had sensed something was up, arriving much earlier than he was expected.
