Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

Her story about Sandoval having invented playing cards, for example, and naming the aces after his own title, was, Rivas knew, exactly backward. Rivas had read a journal kept during the First Ace's reign, and had learned that the citizens of Ellay had wanted to confer the title of king upon the man who had founded the currency, had the wall built, broken the terror hold of the piratical «motorcyclists» known as the hooters, and re-instituted agriculture. Sandoval had accepted the job but not the title. «There've been too many kings,» he was reported to have said; «and Queen or Jack or Joker won't do—I'll be the first Ace.»

The old woman seemed to be winding down anyway. «I see success for you both,» she said. «The spirits say you're cookin' with gas. For you, man,» she went on, pointing at Barrows, «I see an increase in your fortune, I see those old brandy bottles just a-rolling toward you.»

Rivas looked over at Barrows. Yes, the chance of mention of brandy had firmly set the Toothtalker's hook—the old man's eyes were wide and his knuckles were white on the arms of the chair.

«And for you,» she continued, now pointing at Rivas and eyeing his bare wedding ring finger, «I see . . . a reunion with a long-lost lover, a wedding and . . . six unsporting children.»

Rivas blinked. You old phony, he thought in instant panic, don't say that, he believes your idiot predictions! The musician glanced apprehensively at the old man and, sure enough, Barrows was staring at him coldly and nodding.

«I wondered how great the risk of that would be,» Barrows murmured.

Rivas abruptly decided that he'd go after Urania unpaid and independently if he had to—but leaving to perform a redemption right now would almost certainly cost him his job, and Barrow's payment would mean the difference between a leisurely, well-fed year or two in which to court another position on the one hand, and poverty and bad food and the selling off of possessions and hasty, undignified begging for any sort of job on the other. And if at all possible he wanted to prevent Barrows from hiring some other re-demptionist who'd certainly only manage to muddy the water and put the Jaybirds on their guard.

«Look,» he said evenly, «this old lady's a fraud, and no more able to tell the future than I am. Now just because she—»

«Don't try to claim that, Rivas,» rasped Barrows. «After she knew—»

«She just said you'd get a lot of money! That's a standard fortuneteller's line, dammit, same as the one she gave me! She didn't know you're the guy that distills it.»

The Toothtalker, disconcerted that so innocuous a prediction had caused such rancor, had been listening closely, and her eyebrows went up at Rivas's last sentence. «Yes I did,» she said instantly. «The vibratory dimensions told me everything. Greg Rivas and Irwin Barrows, you two are.»

Smothering a curse, Rivas sprang out of his chair, crossed to the window and picked up the telephone receiver, which had quieted down but began buzzing again when he jiggled it. «Damn it,» he shouted at Barrows, «none of this is real. Look.» He unscrewed the perforated plastic cap on the earpiece and a large wasp flew out; it looped a confused figure-eight in front of his eyes and then lighted on his cheek and stung him. «Ow, goddammit.»

«You see?» cried the Toothtalker triumphantly. «You can't mess with scientifical machinery with impunity!» The wasp found the window and disappeared outside. «Look, you made me lose my . . . high frequency receptor.»

Rivas saw that Barrows, who evidently didn't know how telephones were supposed to have worked, was even more impressed with the Toothtalker's powers now than he'd been a minute ago. «Holy smokes,» the old man exclaimed, «Rivas isn't going to die, is he?»

Rivas started to say, scathingly, «Of a wasp sting? » but the old woman, with the reflexes of a veteran entertainer used to quelling troublesome audiences, whipped a squirt gun out from under her robe and squeezed off a blast of raw high-proof gin straight into his face; Rivas squawked, reeled blindly to the window and hung on the sill, gasping and spitting.

«He would have,» she said serenely, «if I hadn't given him that. Radio liquor, distilled from isotopes. He's lucky I had some handy—that was no ordinary wasp.»

Feeling defeated, Rivas straightened up, took a deep breath and turned around to face Barrows. «Listen to me,» he said. «I'll promise to bring her back to your house-assuming I can get her away from the Jaybirds—if you'll promise to let her go with me if she understands what she'd be doing . . . and if she should happen to want to, after all these years. How's that? We'll leave it up to Uri to decide whether this lady's prediction was accurate.» Barrows started to speak, but Rivas interrupted him by taking a firmer grip on the telephone receiver, which he somehow hadn't let go of, and slamming it very hard against the concrete window sill. The receiver exploded, and bits of yellow plastic buzzed through the air and clattered around among the piles of incomprehensible old junk. «And of course,» Rivas went on, «keep in mind the fact that I'm the only redemptionist with any real chance of getting her at all.»

Barrows squinted at him for several seconds, and Rivas was a little surprised to see that the old man actually looked uncertain and even a little sick—as if the price of this redemption had begun to involve something more than his Currency.

«You make it hard on both of us,» Barrows said softly.

Rivas wasn't sure he knew what the old man meant, but he said, «I'm just divvying up the weight.» He crossed to where Barrows was sitting and stuck out his right hand. «Promise?»

Barrows sighed. «I truly hope she doesn't decide to join you. Yes, I promise.» He reached up and with the slow emphasis of a weary judge rapping a gavel, shook Rivas's hand.

* * *

Few of his sophisticated friends would have recognized the lost-looking fellow standing in the rain-puddled square by the South Gate as Gregorio Rivas; he had spent the hour since leaving the Toothtalker's parlor at a tailor's and a barber shop. Now, looking years younger with his half beard shaved off and his hair pulled back and funneled into a tarred stump at the back of his neck and his wild clothes replaced by a neat suit of off white flax, he was the very picture of a well-born youth bewildered at finding himself alone, jiggerless and hungover in the nastier end of the big city.

He wasn't the only person loitering there. In general parlance the South Gate consisted of the area immediately roundabout as well as the actual gate through which Sandoval Street entered the walled city, and it was perhaps the busiest and most crowded fifty square yards in southern California. At the moment Ellay's most successful lumber scavenger was bringing several wagons into the city, each one piled high with wooden beams, most of them gray and caked with concrete but a few still bright with ancient paint. The musty smell of freshly resurrected lumber contended in the morning air with the aroma of the hot tacos being sold on several street corners, the stench from Dogtown every time the wind faltered, and the smoky pungency of the charcoal and lye guilds out on eastern Woolshirt; and the big old buildings on the west side of Sandoval echoed back the cacophony of daily life among the barrows and gullies and shacks on the other side. Rivas's aching head was assaulted with an auctioneer's jabbering from the big wooden warehouse that was the Relic Exchange, the ringing of hammers in the various blacksmith booths, and even, he half suspected, the clink, clank and curse of the steel miners under the streets, struggling to free and bring up pieces of the vast steel beams that lay tumbled and rusting under the fine soil of the whole eastern half of Ellay. And there was even, Rivas noted with a wry grin, a street balladeer playing a pelican and ineptly singing «Everybody Wants to Smoke My Comoy.» Rivas rubbed his smooth chin and wondered if he wasn't leaving more of himself in the city than he was taking with him.