"You're all mall-rats," he observed aloud.
One of them, a brown rat with white paws, jumped up on his chest. He was half Rattila's size, which made him perhaps a twentieth of Chumley's.
"You got a problem with that?" he asked, showing his long, white teeth.
"Why, no," Chumley insisted mildly. It was a game effort to intimidate, and though it was ineffective against his present target, Chumley respected it. "I'm not speciesist—just commenting. My goodness, my manners have just gone out the window today, what?"
"Listen to him talk, dude," a slender, pale-furred specimen remarked. "We sure he's not one of us? He doesn't sound like a Troll."
"Enough, Oive!" Rattila snarled. "Bring me my power!"
Obediently the mall-rat on Chumley's chest hopped down. All nine moved toward Rattila, clusters of cards held up. The black rat gathered them all up and touched them to the gold card.
A flash of light blazed from Rattila's scrawny paws. It enveloped the black rat and made him seem larger. Chumley disapproved.
The light died away, and Rattila flung the lesser cards away from him. "So close," he wailed, clutching the glowing golden card. "It's still not enough! I want to be a magician!"
He bounded down from his throne to Chumley.
"You shall give me your identity, too," he slavered, bringing his red eyes close to Chumley's mismatched yellow ones.
"I don't believe so," Chumley replied.
He hadn't much magik of his own, but he had been raised in a magikal household, where Mums and Little Sister were always slinging off spells, and woe betide the unlucky Troll who hadn't at least a shield spell to protect him! He concentrated on raising it, even as the drooling rat laid his mangy paws upon him.
He was shocked to feel that the Ratislavan's magik cut through his defensive enchantment as an axe through tissue paper. Chumley rolled away, trying to keep Rattila from touching him again. Alas, the room was too crowded to allow a meaningful escape. His energetic gyrations brought mountains of boxes cascading down upon him until he was well and truly trapped.
"Resistance is useless," Rattila hissed, drawing magik crackling out of the air.
"Oh, heavens,, no, it's not," Chumley replied weakly. "You know, you can't build a decent circuit without it, what?"
The Troll fought valiantly, but his limbs had been struck powerless. "Oh, how distasteful," he exclaimed, as the black rat laid paws upon him.
"How could we miss someone kidnapping a Troll?" I demanded, pacing around the purple carpet in the ruins of Massha's Secret at about four the next morning. With the help of the entire Mall security force and about half the shopkeepers, we had split up and covered every yard of The Mall we could. My feet were killing me, but guilt drove me. I couldn't stop moving.
"You were concerned about me," Massha pointed out, looking embarrassed. "Who knew they would go after
someone else? We all assumed that Rattila was going for the victims with the greatest magikal talent."
"Yes," Cire piped up. "I would have thought I'd be the logical next target."
I snorted. Eskina looked woeful.
"The trails go nowhere!" she reported. "I followed them all, every set of footsteps that led out from the tent, but the tracks are spoiled. Too many scents, then nothing. Chumley's is not there at all. They must have carried him."
"We have no witnesses," Parvattani admitted, wearily. He'd supervised the whole operation on the run at my side. His tall ears were droopy with exhaustion. "I have seen the crystal balls and consulted every lookout. They must have-a disguised themselves as soon as they left the tent. I followed several leads of groups carrying a large burden out of The Mall, but all of them check out. Grotti's Carpets had a special sale today."
"This is terrible," Massha moaned. "Should we go back and try to find Tananda? She could help."
I stopped pacing and rounded on her.
"Are you saying we can't handle this by ourselves?" I roared.
Massha was taken aback. "There's no need to jump down my throat, big guy! I just thought she's got the right to know her brother's been abducted. She might have some, I don't know, Trollish way of finding a family member."
"Not as far as I know," I informed her sulkily. "And I've known the two of them for decades. I'm as worried about him as you are. We've got a pretty good force right here. You've got my experience and brains, your intuition and talent, Cire's ... we've got Cire—"
"Hey!" Cire protested.
"—Eskina, Par, and just about the whole population of The Mall willing to help us. Let's give it one big try. If we don't locate him soon, I promise, I'll go and collect Tananda, Guido, Nunzio and the whole Mormon Tabernacle Choir."
In spite of her exhaustion Massha's big mouth quirked
in a half grin. "It's not that I don't believe in you, Aahz, honey. Where my friends are concerned I don't really believe in myself."
"Well, you ought to," I insisted. "I might have been pissed off when Skeeve let go of that cushy job as Court Magician, but I think you bring qualities to it he never did." Massha floated over, threw her arms around me, and gave me a big kiss. "Hey, save it for Hugh!"
"You know, Aahz, you may have the teeth of a land shark," she smiled, "but your bark is a heck of a lot bigger than your bite. Okay. Let's brainstorm. How do we get Chumley back?"
I couldn't look at her for a minute. I turned to our local expert. "What do you think, Eskina?"
"It is not logical," she agreed. "I think it must be a slap in our faces. Rattila has never needed to take his victims away, only their identities. This is directed at us, to show that he can remove our strongest colleague, and there is nothing we can do about it! We cannot even find his hideout, because we cannot trace the scent to where he and his servants go to ground."
"What did you say?" I demanded, ceasing my pacing in midstep.
"I—" she began, looking confused.
"Never mind," I waved it away, feeling like the sorriest neophyte ever to hang out a shingle. "You said trace. Why didn't we think of that before?" I smacked myself in the forehead, hard.
"What?" Massha asked. "What didn't we think of?"
"We've been trying to set traps for them here in The Mall," I explained. "Rattila's just sent us an engraved invitation to carry the fight into his own domain, only he forgot to put a return address on the envelope. We"—I indicated our little party—"are going to phone the reverse directory and get it."
Eskina's eyes widened. "What does that mean?"
"It means," Massha translated, her eyes shining with admiration, "that we're going to plant tracers on Rattila's
impostors and get them to show us where he hides out. We tag them, then follow them to their lair. It can't be too far away. They are in and out of here too often. Good thinking, sugar!"
"Could be extradimensional," I reminded her, "but you've got your gizmo. I'm prepared to follow them to hell and back."
"Me, too, Aahz, honey," Massha agreed, patting me on the hand.
"But how are we going to tag them?" Cire asked. "They're not going to sit down obligingly and let us tie GPS transmitters to their collars."
"Oh, yes, they are," I insisted. "In fact, they'll pay for the privilege of having us do it."
"How?" Parvattani demanded impatiently.
I gestured at the room around us. "Massha's Secret is going to open up for one more round of sales: a going-out-of-business sale. We've got to promote the heck out of it. Put up posters, whatever it takes. Go wake up Marco and have him paper The Mall with advertising. We're going to reopen for one day only to let go of a little special merchandise."
"But we don't have any merchandise," Cire pointed out, indicating the bare walls.
"We will," I insisted. "I'm going to go pick it up on Deva. Get this place cleaned up and ready. I'll see you in a few hours." I pulled my D-hopper out of my pocket.
"Good luck, Hot Stuff," Massha wished me, blowing a kiss.
TWENTY-FOUR
; Six hours later, Moa reopened Massha's Secret to great fanfare.
The rest of the team had done a terrific job cleaning the place up. A hastily deployed curtain took the place of the splintered dressing-room door. Where the decor had been too damaged to repair at such short notice, Cire had covered it with an illusion. Most of the displays could be resurrected and put to use. All that had lacked, up until one half hour ago, was something to put on them.
I stood behind the counter, ready, still smarting a little from my whirlwind visit back to Deva. In order to get merchandise with only a couple of hours' notice I had had to use that phrase that all Deveels love and no one with any sanity would use: price is no object. I spent half an hour on a brainstorming session with sleepy Deveel fashion designers. To cut the fee somewhat I negotiated partial credit with them, because within a few days all of them would be working for Deveel merchants waiting the remaining two days to break into our market.
That wasn't important. The whole idea, I kept reminding myself, was to get what I needed, immediately, to save Chumley, to break the influence Rattila held over Massha, and to keep Skeeve from falling into his power.
I got what I wanted: within a mere five hours they produced twenty dozen garters, all of them very, very special. I figured for my purposes that number would be plenty.
As soon as I had the boxes in hand, I hopped back to The Mall. Parvattani's guards could hardly hold back the crowds already hanging around outside the shop. The avid shoppers oohed and aahed as we hung up the garters. I gave a quick rundown to the Djinnies.
"Mood detector, snack dispenser, MP3 player, poison nullifier, poison ring, love philter, steamer trunk." I stated, going down the rows and pointing to each of the items in turn. "Baby monitor, burglar alarm, perfume bottle, portable safe, memo reminder—and don't forget, when Cire slips you the word"—I stopped behind the counter and showed them a box underneath—"push these goods on whomever he's pointing at. Got that?"
They nodded. These two, Nita and Furina Djinnelli had been hired for the day from The Volcano. Rimbaldi had promised me his two nieces were the smartest salesclerks he had. I was counting on that. Chumley's life might depend upon it. I knew this was our last chance.
At ten on the dot, I nodded to Moa, who cut the ribbon. Accompanied by the reedy strains of The Mall's sale music, the shoppers poured in.
"Ooh! I didn't see these the other day!" an Imp woman cooed, falling all over a powder blue baby monitor garter. "Oh, this would come in so handy!"
"These are absolutely great!" a Klahd agreed. 'These are even better than the first shipments. Too bad they're going out of business!"
"Mine!" shrieked a Deveel.
"Mine!" a Gnome shrieked back, trying to haul a black lace love philter garter away from her.
"Mine!"
"Mine!"
By eleven, Ore had tipped the wink to Nita and Furina about a dozen times. I was pretty sure there would be some overlap, since we never could be sure which were the real shoppers in the database, and which were the phonies, but by the end I was certain the ground had been thoroughly seeded.
Take that, you son of a rat, I thought. No one kidnaps one of my friends without suffering the consequences.
And, right on schedule, about half past eleven, Inspector Dota and his merry stiffs arrived.
"Shut this place down," he ordered Massha. "You don't have a right to hold a going-out-of-business sale, because you never were in business in the first place."
I pushed myself in front of him.
"Yeah, de jure we weren't in business, but de facto we should be able to hold a clearance sale, since you're denying us sales during the preprocessing time, and we can't wait around for our identification card to clear."
Dota glared at me.
"Cease all sales at once," he ordered the Djinnies, who were wrapping boxes furiously.
They looked at me. I glanced at Cire, who gave me a meaningful nod.
"Do it." I turned to the crowd of waiting shoppers. The Djinnies backed away from the counter. "Ladies and gentlemen and—whatever: due to circumstances beyond my control the sale is suspended. Any further transactions are illegal."
"Awwwwww!" A woeful cry arose from the audience.
"So, since we can't sell 'em," I began, every syllable making my teeth hurt, but I reminded myself, this was for Skeeve, for Massha, and for Chumley, "you can take whatever items you wish, free of charge."
"Yayyyyyy!"
The woe changed to cheers and whoops of joy. Shoppers began pulling everything they could reach off the
displays and walls. The usual fistfights had started, mixed it up, then broken up hastily lest the combatants miss any chance to grab free swag. A group of shoppers got together and stormed the back room, pulling down crate after crate of goods. I felt a wrench as each of them marched out the door carrying merchandise I had paid for and for which I now had no means of recovering the cost.
In no time the store was stripped to the walls.
"You brought that on yourself," the inspector informed me. "I hope you feel satisfied."
I narrowed a baleful eye at him even though I did feel satisfied at that moment. "You've ruined our day. I'm no longer a merchant in this establishment, so I'm no longer under your jurisdiction, so you get your indigo butts out of my legally leased space, or I'm going to teach your bully boys a new place to hide their crossbows."
Inspector Dota gathered his dignity and departed. I slammed the door behind them.
"We are now officially out of business," I announced.
"How could the tax inspectors have gotten on to us so fast?" Massha asked, bemused.
I folded my arms and leaned against the wall, very satisfied.
"Because I called in the tip myself. We didn't need a whole lot of time, just enough to make sure our tracers went out with the right people."
"Aahz," Massha remarked. "You are a genius."
"Save the compliments for when we get Chumley back," I stated, slapping my hands together and rubbing them hard. "Now, let's give 'em a while, and start running down the traces."
"But of course, Aahz," Rimbaldi exclaimed exuberantly, when I took him aside in The Volcano for a private chat. The usual flock of Klahds were gathered, openmouthed,
around a salesgirl doing a demonstration on the Gold Pocket Djeans, so no one was looking at us.
"The entire fleet of Djinnelli family carpets will be at your service, whenever you wish. Gustavo has offered weapons. Marco has offered any security arrangements you might need."
"Thanks," I breathed. "I don't know how far or how fast we'll have to move."
"They are yours, though you have to fly to the ends of the dimension, my friend! We are so sorry about the Troll."
I winced at the notion of running all over Flibber. I was already regretting that I had let so many tracers go out. But I was playing the odds. I was betting that experienced thieves like Rattila's would have captured a preponderance of the tagged goods. I hoped we would only have to chase one or two concentrated signals. At the moment The Mall was still full of small traces, scattered in every direction.
"No one saw anything unusual around here yesterday afternoon?" I asked.
"Oh, no," Rimbaldi insisted. "Business was very brisk. Several hundred purchases, two shipments, many rights— it was a good day."
I turned to go. "Just keep your eyes open, will you?"
"Of course," Rimbaldi asserted. "Your mission is our mission!"
Everyone knew what we were doing. Marco, a total convert to our cause, had spread the word privately among his relatives, and Eskina and Sibone had made sure that each and every one of their friends was on board with us.
"Wait until The Mall closes," I insisted when anyone asked me. "Just hang on."
"It's an hour before the place closes down," Massha observed, kicking one foot impatiently in the "husband's
chair" in the empty storefront. She jingled her collection of magikal jewelry, suppleme
nted by a few choice purchases she had made that day. "I don't know about your capacity for shopping, but I couldn't have lasted from ten this morning until now. I'm too antsy to wait much longer. I'm worried about Chumley."
"I agree with Massha." I glanced toward Cire, who was playing some kind of interactive game with a guy in another dimension through his crystal ball propped on the counter. "How about it? Are we ready to start running them down?"
"Gotta go, Delos," he remarked to the face in the globe. He snapped the atlas of The Mall down on the counter and put the crystal down on top of it. He passed his hands over its surface, and the ball clouded up. "Okay, I'm ready."
"I, too," Eskina added, showing her sharp little teeth.
Parvattani rose to his feet and saluted me. "The Mall force is at your service, sir!"
"It's just Aahz," I corrected him, with a sigh. "All right, let's move it out."
Cire flew out ahead of us, keeping his eye on the joined orb and map. "My global-positioning system," he explained, hovering about five feet off the ground. "There's a lot of dispersal already," he continued, nearly colliding with a couple of gigantic black insectoids rolling their purchases down the hall with their hind legs. "A few have gone ex-dimension."
"Uh-huh," I acknowledged. It would be a pain to chase them, but we were ready.
"Hmm. A few of your hard-core shoppers are sticking with it. I show a few big clusters of garter signal still here in The Mall."
"Ooh, their aching feet," Massha offered sympathetically, flying alongside Cire.
"Might be the thieves," I suggested. "I figure Rattila's
got at least a dozen henchcreatures, and they will have snatched more of our special booty than anyone else. Let's check out the closest traces first. Which is the biggest?"
Cire changed direction at the next intersection, heading toward Doorway K. He and Massha picked up air speed. Eskina and I found ourselves trotting after them, with Parvattani and his troop quick-marching behind.
"This is a really big collection," Cire informed us, excitedly. "I wouldn't be surprised if we found the whole gang right here."
MYTH-Taken Identity Page 22