Mercedes Lackey - The Wizard of Karres

Across light-years, the hexaperson issued a collective sigh. Not because of the disappointment, so much as the simple fact of it. They had lived a life of splendid isolation, after all, and the recognition that they now intended to give it up—if at all possible—produced very mixed feelings.

The Sedmon watching through the nightscope didn't personally recognize the trio in the farm. But the Sedmons back in the tower at the House of Thunders had access to a great many records.

They found her. And her associates.

The Sedmon turned to Thora. "There is an Imperial bounty on her head. A million maels, I believe. Her real name is Nairdoo Sheyan. Among other things, she's wanted for the mass murder of the miners on Coolum's World. The second one, Henry Bagr, is worth a mere fifty thousand. The third, I believe, is your local Fullbricht fellow. He'll be worth something too, I imagine, though not much."

"Do we get a cut?" inquired Thora. She looked as if she regretted the words almost as soon as she said them.

But Sedmon smiled at her. "You can have it all, Thora. You've been most efficient and helpful, and I believe in rewarding those of my subordinates who are. Your talents are clearly wasted, anyway, just smuggling and spying and selling expensive trinkets."

A thought came to him. "Although, before I leave the planet, I'll want to purchase a suitable trinket for . . . ah, someone. A young lady."

"I have just the thing."

"Good. And now, let's finish this business."

The smile was still on the Sedmon's face, but it had become a very grim sort of thing. He had no way of knowing it, but at that moment Thora had no doubt at all that her boss was in the direct line of descent from the Daals of Uldune who had committed far worse crimes than even such as Nairdoo Sheyan.

"The reward specifies 'dead or alive,' " he murmured. "Make that 'dead,' if you please. The Sheyan creature has been threatening certain, ah, interests of mine. And I'm not in a charitable mood."

"Who's that?" Pausert asked Mannicholo sharply, pointing to a sausage vendor strolling among the audience. The man looked perfectly ordinary, with his hotbox of sausages slung over his shoulders and not a sign of manner, costume, or oddity to mark him. That was suspicious, for it meant he was too ordinary to be one of Himbo Petey's people.

"Eh? Oh. Local. Petey has all the real food here sold and made by locals."

"Locals? But I thought we sold—"

Mannicholo shook his head vigorously, so that his facial colors swirled like oil on the water. "All we sell are CarniSnax, that come straight out of the replicators. CarniCorn, CarniFluff, CarniPops, CarniCreme, CarniBars, CarniBites, and CarniSlurps. Fat, sugar, starch, water and salt, is all that's in them; one hundred percent artificially flavored and nutritionally null, packed with enough preservatives that if you pick up a Pak in a thousand years it still won't have passed its sell-by date. The stuff's pure garbage but it's guaranteed not to poison any sapient in the known universe. Real food gets sold by the locals and we take a cut. That way we don't have to store and cook real food for more than the crew, and if anybody gets poisoned, or wants to claim he has been, he has to take it up with one of his own people."

Pausert eyed the vendor with disfavor. It was going to be hard enough to try and pick out possible crooks, ISS agents, freelance spies and piratical agents out of the crowd as it was. With a lot of loose locals being given carte blanche to run around backstage for the purpose of selling sausage rolls and funnel cakes, it was going to be even harder. You could hide almost any sort of spying mechanism in one of those food boxes! And you could hide weapons, too.

He tried to convey his concern to the rest of the Venture 's crew as they waited for the stagehands to set things up for a final dress rehearsal. Hulik just gave him an opaque look, saying, "It will be just as hard for any spies to find out who we are, Captain. We are part of the showboat family now, and they are notoriously close mouthed around strangers, especially when someone has come around asking questions about one of their own."

Hantis said nothing. "I can smell a spy a mile away," growled Pul. "Don't you worry about that."

The Leewit looked positively bored. "We're smarter than they are," she said, with the absolute confidence of a seven-year-old Mistress of the Universe. "They haven't caught us before, and they won't now."

Pausert decided not to remind her that being encased in ferroplast didn't fall in with his definition of "not being caught."

Goth, at least, looked as worried as he felt. "I don't like it either," she admitted. "But we can't keep them off the ship. We'll just have to be careful."

That didn't fit his definition of a solution either. Pausert worried about it so much that all through rehearsal, he kept missing cues and his marks. He'd have thought that Richard Cravan would be so angry with him that he'd be fired from the thespians outright—but nothing whatsoever was said.

In fact, Cravan looked guardedly pleased. Pausert couldn't figure out why, and said so aloud.

Alton Morrisey, the male romantic lead who was playing Romeo to Hulik's Juliet, looked up from his script. "Bad dress, good opening," he said abruptly.

It took Pausert a moment to decipher that. He decided that it must be another of the thespians' superstitions, like never whistling in the theater and always referring to Macbeth as "The Scottish Play" and Richard the Third as "Dick Three-Eyes." Presumably, it meant that a bad dress rehearsal resulted in a good opening performance. He hoped that was right, although for someone like himself who had been trained as a space pilot, the logic was downright bizarre.

But Pausert decided not to worry about it. He was feeling more relaxed, anyway, since now that every single one of them was in stage makeup most of the time he realized that they'd inadvertently stumbled across an splendid antispy technique. He was certain that not even his own mother would recognize him, done up in a foxy-colored wig as Mercutio.

Nevertheless, despite all of his other worries, the moment the curtain came up, somehow he forgot all of them. He watched raptly from the wings as Sampson and Gregory (who were Capulet servants) complained that they would not put up with insults from the Montague family. Then Abram and Balthasar (Montague servants) appeared and the four started quarreling. Benvolio (Lord Montague's nephew) appeared and tried to break up the quarrel, but Tybalt (Lady Capulet's nephew) appeared and picked a fight with Benvolio.

That was Pausert's first cue. Himbo Petey had enforced his will on Richard Cravan at least to this extent: he insisted on melees of the largest possible size whenever there was supposed to be a sword fight. So, the captain rushed onstage to join the action.

Here, Richard Cravan's cleverness showed itself. Every pair of fighters had only four moves to memorize: two attacks and two parries. The secret was that each pair had different combinations, so that it looked like an amazingly complex and very realistic fight. In fact, out in the audience, Pausert could hear cheering and bets being placed. Every actor who knew how to handle a sword was doing so—everyone else was waving or wielding foam batons disguised as clubs or singlesticks. Even Goth, the Leewit, and Hantis were doing so, while Pul put in his bit by lunging into the melee and—carefully!—seizing the leg of one of the actors. It was a well-rehearsed bit of business. Pul dragged the fellow offstage while he screamed at the top of his lungs.

At length, officers tried to break up the fight, even while Lord Capulet (played by Cravan) and Lord Montague (played by Himbo Petey) began to fight one another. The Prince of Verona finally appeared and stopped the fighting, proclaiming sentences of death to any that dared to break the peace of the city again.