"It's bill collectors," Tenobia insisted. "Who knows what the Wuhses bought in the last week? With the treasury empty there's no money for the Wuhses to steal to pay for their purchases. They're looking for saleable assets or collateral."
Loorna lost her patience. She jumped at Wensley and held him high in the air by his collar.
'Talk!" she shrieked. "Where is that damned D-hopper?"
"I don't care if you torment me, foul green viragoes," Wensley choked out, drawing up his narrow chest as far as he could over his little round belly. "I will not betray my friends."
"Oh, now it sounds like he read a book," Charilor sneered.
Caitlin laughed. "What would you know about reading books, you rave queen?"
"Girls!" Nedira snapped. "He's confessing, and you won't even let him speak."
"I am not confessing," the Wuhs protested, then clamped his plump lips shut. The Pervects looked at each other in disbelief. "A Wuhs with a backbone," Vergetta hooted. "I never believed such a thing existed."
"Threaten to tear his legs off," Caitlin suggested.
"Talk, or I'll tear your legs off!" Loorna shouted.
"Now shake him until his teeth rattle."
Loorna shook her fist, and the Wuhs's limbs flailed like those of a rag doll.
"Wait a minute!" she demanded, looking at the youngest Pervect. "Who's conducting this interrogation? You or me?"
"Oh, you can, if you really want to," Caitlin yawned, leaning back in her chair. "I figured as long as you were going by the book I could just coach you. It saves time."
"Why isn't anyone taking this seriously?" Paldine asked. "Our future is at stake here."
"I am. You're pretty brave for a sheep," Loorna hissed right in Wensley's face, "keeping your mouth shut. Got some Dutch courage from somewhere? I don't smell any alcohol on you."
"I need no alcohol. I know I don't have to tell you anything!"
Loorna grinned. "Well, I don't know if you've ever taken a look downstairs in the dungeons of this sweet little palace of yours. You keep talking about how your ancestors were always so peaceful, cooperative and nice, but I'm here to tell you that there is some pretty nasty torture equipment down there that even Pervects would never have thought of using on another living being. I am just on the edge of taking you down there and using some of it on you. Or," she leaned close enough so that the Wuhs could see the gold flecks in her bright yellow eyes, "we'll make you eat some of our food. Talk!"
TWENTY-TWO
"What does this have to do with assembling the Death Star?"
— G. M. TARKIN
"Whew!" I whistled, as we emerged in the tidy gardens of Kobol. Zol stood up from the marble bench where he had been waiting for us. "Do you think that Pervect got a good look at us?"
"I think we must assume," Zol replied, "that she did see us as we were, undisguised. And if she did not, there were plenty of witnesses to our tour. I think you must assume that she will have a full description of us very soon. The Wuhses are more adept at self-preservation than they are at maintaining discreet silence."
"You mean they'll save their own skins," Tananda translated.
"More than that: the odd behavior that we all witnessed among a segment of the workers indicates to me that they are engaged upon an enterprise of which even they are unaware. You saw the look of stupefaction on the faces of those males. They all believe that they make handcrafts, but it is clear from the involuntary re-creation of the repet- itive motions they went through that it could be nothing of the sort. Since Wuhses cannot keep a secret they must not know it."
"The situation is worse than I thought—worse than Wensley thought," I stated grimly. "Not only are the Pervects in total control of the country, they're bending the minds of the inhabitants. It's inhumane."
"What do you suppose it is that they're making?" Bunny asked. "It seemed when that fellah pounded on the top that it looked like something mechanical."
"Some kind of armaments?" Tananda guessed. "But it's nothing I've seen anywhere, in or out of the Assassins Guild."
"It does rather look like a weapon of some kind," Zol suggested. "How curious. There must be a spell on some part of the process to fool the conscious mind into believing that they are still performing their usual functions."
"That would be why we never found out who was making those glasses," I mused, thoughtfully. "Nobody would remember doing it. Do they plan to take over another dimension?"
"Or to sell to one," Zol suggested. "These are enterprising women, and you will have observed that they did not need arms to take over Wuh or Scamaroni. In one they are already successful, and in the other they would have been, if not for your intervention."
"Next time I'm going to make sure they're captured and stay under lock and key," I asserted, pounding my fist into my palm. "All of them. We have to get back into the castle to figure out where they're going and head them off."
"Oh, we don't need to do that," Zol informed me. "Now that my notebook has been in contact with their computer, we can access their drive remotely." To my puzzled expression he explained, "We can see what they see in their magik mirror."
"I thought you couldn't get through their encoding," Bunny queried. "We don't need to. My countrymen back on Kobol broke their basic program code. What they are working on at any given moment is not going to be stored under lock and key. We can spy upon their plans as they make them. I merely need to be in the same dimension, preferably upon the same energy line."
"You can't do it from here?" I asked. "On Perv they could communicate with the banks on Deva through their computers."
"That was with the cooperation of the Devan computers. The Pervect Ten will surely not want us reading their plans. We need to be close for my subterfuge to work. Our only fear then will be discovery."
"I'll keep us hidden," I vowed, grimly. "I won't fail again. I owe it to Wensley's memory." A thought occurred to me just then. "You know, I hate to say this, but it's just as well that he isn't around any more. If we had plotted this out in front of him he would have blabbed to the Ten about us."
"We're having to do this because of you, honey," Vergetta confided to the snow globe on the table as Niki dragged in the first invitee.
All their threats of torture, all their shouting and shaking had done nothing to dent the resolve of the Wuhs leader, Wensley. Vergetta had to admit to herself that she was pretty impressed, with the little guy. It took a strong person to defy a Pervect, let alone the whole minyan of them. Big, brave Trolls had broken down in tears when faced with the Ten in full fury. Even a bowl of purple Pervish gumbo had not been enough to make him open his mouth. A miniature picture of defiance, he sat crosslegged and arms folded on the bottom of the paperweight.
"Let's see how long you hold out when you see us take some of your friends apart." The little face turned away from her. Vergetta grinned.
"First things first," Tenobia demanded, when the fat Wuhs with black curls had been flung into the "hot seat," a chair in the middle of the room.
They had drawn straws to see who got to be "Lady High Executioner," and she had won. In celebration she had put on a silver bustier and a tight black skirt that she usually saved for wild parties at home on Perv. The ensemble looked suitably dangerous and very impressive, the virtual caricature of a dominatrix torturer. The Wuhs's eyes nearly started out of his head at the sight of her. She smacked her palms down on the arms of the chair and leaned into his face.
"Where's the D-hopper?"
"I d-d-don't know what you mean, madam…" Gubbeen babbled. "It's not my department to keep track… we are the friends of public health… the D-hopper is more of a safety issue…"
Charilor came back upstairs, grunting under the weight of a vast, lumpy bag. She threw it on the stone floor in front of the Wuhs. It clanked and banged like a suit of armor in a garbage disposal. Their guest nearly jumped out of his seat at the noise.
"I don't have it!" Gubbeen exclaimed, his eye on the sack, though none of
them moved towards it. "I haven't had it for ages. It's been my turn… I mean, I would have safeguarded it on your behalf, but I really don't know, dear ladies, Ardrahan had it last time I saw it… please don't hurt me!"
"I don't know why we didn't do this six months ago," Loorna grimaced.
She kicked open the folds of the bag and extracted a metal implement with a rotating wheel and several long, sharp strands of metal. She pointed it at Gubbeen and rotated the little handle that made the tines clash violently against one another. The Wuhs recoiled into his chair, trying to meld with the wooden staveback.
Vergetta recognized the device as a whisk they used to aerate hot drinks. She hadn't seen it for months. It had probably gotten dumped into the hold-all drawer in the kitchen, or shoved into a box in a storage closet. She smiled. Obviously the Wuhs, who had never seen one, was making up his own uses for it in his head, and none of them made him comfortable.
They played with him a while longer, going up the threat scale from kitchen implements to sports equipment, and through to genuine torture devices, but the Wuhs continued to shriek out that he had given them all the information that he had about the missing D-hopper. They had no choice but to believe him. He was so overwrought that Vergetta called a halt to the questioning. Nedira escorted him down to one of the padded cells in the basement to calm down a little bit before they would let him go.
Vergetta waved her arms, bringing Wensley out again.
"We were interrupted, darlink. Your friend wasn't much help. Would you like to cooperate a little?"
"Never," the Wuhs declared. "We will be rid of you and your foul enterprises soon. The Great Skeeve will see to that!"
"What's this?" Vergetta demanded, leaning close to make sure she had heard him correctly. "What about the Great Skeeve?"
"He will defeat you." Wensley made a gesture that included every Pervect present. "All of you!"
"You?" Oshleen asked, narrowing her eyes. "You hired the Klahd wizard?"
"You got us thrown in jail? Fined? You got our merchandise confiscated!" Paldine gritted out crime after crime. She started toward the pale Wuhs with her claws out.
"That's it," Vergetta exclaimed, getting in between them. "You stop," she told the marketing specialist, then turned to point at Wensley. "You get a permanent time-out while I figure out what we are going to do with you."
She waved her hand, and the Wuhs was restored to his spherical prison. "But you heard what he said!" Paldine exclaimed, trying to get around her elder.
"Yes, and what good will it do to tear him to pieces? It won't solve our problem. But now we have at least some of the answers. We've been looking for the cause of our troubles all over the dimensions, and it was right here under our noses. I bet the Great Skeeve got Zol Icty involved, got him to condemn us for a favor."
"If it really was Zol Icty," Oshleen cautioned. "Skeeve's supposed to be such a great wizard it was probably one of his illusions."
"Here's the next one," Niki grunted, hauling in another Wuhs.
"We'll finish with you later," Paldine promised Wensley, gold veins standing out in her yellow eyes. "Count on it."
"Cashel's your name, right?" Tenobia asked, planting a silver spike heeled boot on the Wuhs's knee and sticking her fists into her hips. "I've seen you in the castle a lot lately. But you don't work here, do you? Where do you work?"
"Factory number nine," Niki supplied.
"Right. So what are you doing down in the treasury all the time? You wouldn't be the one who's always extracting money, even though you know that we've got rules about requesting hard currency."
"M… money, dear ladies?" Cashel gulped, his eyes darting warily to all the various pieces of hardware that Tenobia was idly fondling. "I wouldn't break rules, not at least ones I understood to be absolute strictures against… certain behaviors…"
"Just what did you think that money was for?"
The Wuhs looked up hopefully. He must have thought he knew the answer to this one. "… Er, buying things?"
"What things?"
"… Uh… things for you?"
"No, you fool!" Tenobia roared, throwing up her hands in exasperation. "Supplies. Staples. Building materials. Food. Equipment. A consulting contract that your leaders signed willingly two years ago! Things for you! Your spending habits are driving us crazy!"
Cashel looked from one Pervect to another in deep confusion. "Then… I don't understand, ladies, why you're upset. We're buying things for us. I mean," he added, recoiling at the furious expression on Loorna's face, "whoever's taking the money. It's certainly not me. I'm in favor of public support, really."
Vergetta shook her head. They were getting nowhere. Naturally the ones they interviewed were never the ones who had brought in new merchandise or stolen the money. It was always somebody else.
"Who has the D-hopper?" Tenobia interrupted before the Wuhs could start another string of evasions and lies. "Who had it the last time you saw it? Answer now!"
"Coolea," Cashel sobbed, dropping his face into his hands. "Yesterday. He ought to be back by now. I hope. He really wouldn't listen to the instructions, he was so eager to see other dimensions…"
Nedira threw a nod to Vergetta, picked one of their invisibility cloaks off a hook on the wall and vanished out of the chamber. It was the closest they'd come to current information, and they wanted to check up on it before it changed hands again.
Cashel was led out, still pleading his innocence but bleating earnestly that he would never again take anything that didn't belong to him. Vergetta popped Wensley out of his spherical prison.
"Honestly, darlink," she told him, "would it be so bad if anyone told us the truth? You have anything else you want to say?"
Wensley pressed his lips together and shook his head.
"Wait a minute," Caitlin spoke up, "Nedira's coming back."
The motherly Pervect was among them a second later. Vergetta had to pop Wensley back into his prison so as not to distract the stable boy, who wore an awestruck expression when he realized he was in the presence of the full force of the Pervect Ten. Shaking her head ruefully, Nedira held up a bag.
"Banana-skin shoes. The Deveel who sold them to him is probably still laughing."
"'Slippers,'" Vergetta groaned. "That's such an old one, honey, it plain amazes me that you fell for it. But you're just a kid. What'd you pay for them? A silver piece? They're not worth more than a copper or two, and usually they come with a free banana inside each one."
"Four gold pieces a pair," the boy managed to get out.
"Aaagggh!" Tenobia shrieked, waving her fists. Coolea fled behind the chair for shelter. She pounded on the table. "Every junk seller in all the dimensions must be looking out for you morons, to unload the most useless trash they've got!" She gestured angrily at the others. "I feel like locking him up and throwing away the key."
"No," Oshleen smirked, grinning widely enough to make the Wuhs sway with fear, "send him back and make him ask for a refund."
"The Deveels?" the boy gasped. "No! No! Oh, please, good dames, spare me! Not a refund!"
"Good idea," Nedira agreed with her allies. She grasped Coolea by the shoulder. The two of them disappeared.
"Slippers!" Tenobia pointed a finger at the glass sphere on the table. "You people make me so furious I could eat you, except your lily livers would give me indigestion! After all we've done for you!"
The little figure in the snow globe on the table looked thoughtful.
"All right," Vergetta grunted. "Let's try and get some business done."
TWENTY-THREE
"It's so good, it practically sells itself!"
— FROM THE PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL FOR THE EDSEL
A shaggy-coated herdbeast bleated in my ear. We were sitting among them in the shadow of the king's statue in the park at the other end of town from the castle, on the energy line that supplied power to the Pervect's computer. I had disguised the four of us as beasts to blend in.
Unfortunately, tha
t was earning us some unwanted attention, Tananda especially. Whenever I used an illusion spell to make us look like the denizens of a dimension, she always insisted on being made a beautiful whatever-it-was. In this case, that meant she was the prettiest ewe in town, and every ram in the field was doing his best to get her attention.
Bunny was less enamored of sitting in the middle of a smelly feed lot, and didn't care what kind of a herdbeast she looked like. Normally she would be neck and neck with Tananda, insisting on the current standard of beauty, but at the moment she was watching Zol avidly as he linked his little notebook to the Pervect's magik mirror. I noticed that Bytina having touched Zol's computer, now had exactly the same pictures appearing in her little looking glass. It seemed that infinite links could be made very easily.
"The ironic thing," Zol began, as his long fingers flew over the button board, "is that the easiest way into a system is through its security gates. The least safe mode for a computer is when it is operating."
"Stands to reason," I replied. Though I knew nothing about computers, I knew something about systems. "When you're in the midst of a mission, the last thing you have time to do is watch your own back."
That was why I had partners. At the moment I was in the "back-watching" position, and Zol was gathering the information we needed.
Zol gave me a luminous smile of approval. "Precisely, Master Skeeve! I never ceased to be amazed by your capacity for comprehension."
I smiled back, a little uneasily. Not that I didn't enjoy basking in the little gray man's fulsome praise, but after having to pry compliments out of my former associates with a crowbar I mistrusted someone who threw off accolades whenever… he felt I'd earned one. He seemed just a little too easy to please. He didn't seem to notice my discomfort.
"Now, by looking at the active components, the open books on the desktop, so to speak, we can see what they have been doing today. Hmm… they have a weather-prediction program… that one they are using hasn't got the latest updates. The prognostication section has a flaw. It foretells firestorms when it means light rain. It's given rise to panic in some dimensions, as you might guess. Yes, see here?" he pointed at the center of the mirror. " 'Partly sunny, with widespread devastation toward evening.' There's a partial letter home… and the operator has played over five hundred games of solitaire, with a 7:1 win-lose ratio." "Whew!" I whistled. "I'd have liked to hire her as a dealer for the casino our partnership once owned. She must have very fast fingers."
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