“Have you ever seen one of your fellows lose its temper? It seemed to me that the blow was struck in a fit of rage, without planning or forethought; I cannot otherwise account for how anyone could be so foolish as to slay your master today, when my men and I were here, rather than on some private occasion when no witnesses were present.”
“Indeed, my lord, I cannot imagine how it could be otherwise.”
“Have you ever seen one of them lose its temper?”
“Often, my lord. Nampach was furious at the mice in the pantry, and the other day Thoob went shouting across the yard about something. Someone threw a pot at me once, but I never determined who was responsible. I fear we are all as prone to anger as any human.”
“Do you have any idea who slew your master?”
Yar looked down at the floor for a long moment before replying, “I have no knowledge of who did it, my lord. Sometimes I think it might have been Nahris, as part of a joke gone wrong, but I have no evidence to support that suspicion.”
“It appeared to be a fit of temper, not a joke gone wrong.”
“And all of us are capable of fits of temper.”
“Indeed. Thank you, Yar. You are free to go.”
Nampach was the next to be questioned. Its responses were much like Yar’s, right down to acknowledging that fits of clumsiness were common, but denying any memory of ever having had one itself.
“Nor am I aware of any gaps in my memory, Your Grace,” it said. “But I suppose I might have lost the memory of such gaps, as well.”
Croy had definite suspicions about the clumsiness now. “Can you say for certain which of your fellows have had these spells? I realize you cannot say with certainty who has not, but can you confirm any who have?”
Nampach had to think about that, and finally answered simply, “No.”
Each of the others, in turn, denied any memory of experiencing bouts of awkwardness.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Nampach drop anything,” Suturb volunteered. “Nahris is usually quite agile, but there have been incidents that might have been its doing.”
Nahris shrugged when asked who had been clumsy. “I’m afraid I just haven’t paid attention, my lord.”
“They always blame me,” Thoob said, “but I never drop anything! I think it’s mostly Yar, my lord.”
Whereas Yar and Nampach had been released, the three still under suspicion were escorted back to the storeroom after questioning.
“Perhaps we could use the wizard’s magic to determine the guilty party, Your Grace,” Captain Tilza suggested. “These creatures have been assisting him; surely, they must have learned some of the art! Ask the two you trust to work a spell that will compel the truth.”
Croy shook his head. He did not like the idea of inviting the homunculi to practice the arcane arts; it seemed somehow unholy. And besides . . .
“I have a simpler idea,” he said, picking three apples from a bin. “One I really should have thought of sooner.”
Fruit in hand, he returned to the storeroom.
The three suspects were seated on the floor, simply waiting; they looked up at his arrival.
“Catch!” he said, tossing an apple.
The red-banded homunculus, Nahris, caught the apple easily and looked up questioningly.
Croy tossed another, and Suturb, banded with brown, snatched it from the air. The third was lobbed toward blue-marked Thoob.
It bounced from Thoob’s fingers, ricocheted from Nahris’s shoulder, and was neatly captured by Suturb just short of the floor. Suturb handed it to Thoob.
“Now, toss them back,” Croy ordered.
Suturb tossed its apple in a gentle overhand; Nahris glanced at the others, then used a sidearm snap to send its fruit back to the duke’s hand.
Thoob demanded, “Why? What’s going on?”
“Suturb, Nahris,” Croy said, “please move back, away from Thoob.”
“Why?” Thoob asked angrily as the others obeyed.
“You dropped the scepter,” Croy said. “You dropped a chair. You couldn’t catch the apple.”
“I didn’t catch the apple, but I didn’t drop any scepter! That was one of them having an attack, it wasn’t me!”
“No one has any attacks, Thoob,” Croy said. “You’re just clumsy. There’s no design flaw in anyone else; it’s just you. You’re always clumsy and awkward. But you’ve been blaming the others when you break things, saying it wasn’t you, so everyone, even poor Rasec, believed you and thought that you all had moments of ineptitude.”
“We all do!”
“I don’t think so.”
“The master said so!”
“Because you fooled him.”
“I didn’t fool him! He knew it was me all along!” Thoob leaned forward, hands on the floor, as it shouted. “He said it was the others so they wouldn’t realize he was always yelling at me, never at anyone else. He made me clumsy on purpose so he’d have someone to take out his bad temper on, and I put up with it for years. I played along. I let him mock me and abuse me in front of the others, but when he shouted at me in front of you, the new duke—”
Thoob suddenly stopped, realizing what it had said. It looked around, at the shocked expressions on Nahris and Suturb, the determined ferocity of the soldiers guarding the door, and the sadness on Lord Croy’s face, and licked its lips.
“Kill it,” Croy said, stepping aside to make room for the guardsmen.
The soldiers drew their swords and stepped forward to obey their lord’s command.
Au Purr
Esther Friesner
Nebula Award winner Esther Friesner is the author of twenty-nine novels and more than one hundred short stories, in addition to being the editor of six popular anthologies. Her articles on fiction writing have appeared in Writer’s Market and Writer’s Digest books. Besides winning two Nebula Awards in succession for Best Short Story (1995 and 1996, from the Science Fiction Writers of America), she was a Nebula finalist twice and a Hugo finalist once. She received the Skylark Award from NESFA and the award for Most Promising New Fantasy Writer of 1986 from Romantic Times.
She lives in Connecticut with her husband, two children, two rambunctious cats, and a fluctuating population of hamsters.
I didn’t mind that the job paid nothing, or the way I was getting roughed up on a daily basis by a plug-ugly who just didn’t like my looks, or being so close to my niece and nephew without being able to let them know I was there. That stuff I could handle. What really frosted my cauldron was all those blasted mice.
“Look, Joram, look!” little Niko exclaimed, tugging at the cook’s apron and pointing proudly in my direction. He was my biggest advocate in what had once been my sister Magda’s house. “Snowball’s caught another one! Isn’t she a good kitty?”
I sat with my forepaws together, posed in the most fetching way I knew how, a dead mouse dangling from my mouth by its tail. (I truly hated the mousing part of my masquerade—never could stand the taste of rodents, large or small, even when they were just a minor flavoring agent in one of my brews—but mousing was what real cats did. I couldn’t let a little thing like personal taste foul up an otherwise perfect infiltration.) I knew I was the living embodiment of cuteness, an entry in the Pictorial Dictionary of Adorable Felines just waiting to happen, but to make sure of it I tilted my head slightly to the side and managed to utter one small, hopeful “Mew?”
“Snowball,” the cook muttered peevishly through lips thicker than blood sausages. “It’d be Meatball if I had it my way.” That plug-ugly I mentioned earlier? Him: Joram the cook. He had a brick-thick body, a brain to match, and a bad habit of throwing heavy pots at me whenever I ventured into the kitchen unescorted. He even managed to kick me in the rump once or twice, before I got my guard up. A nasty piece of work inside and out, that one, and he’d made it clear from my first day on the job that he had no use for me or for cats in general.
The big lug didn’t dare lay a hand on me while I was with Niko,
though. He could only express his hostility with witty sallies. It was like watching a troll try to make spitballs out of spiderweb.
“Snowball’s a good kitty,” Niko said, answering his own rhetorical question. He knelt down, threw his arms around me, and gave me a fierce cuddling, dead mouse or no dead mouse. “Why won’t you let her eat in the kitchen? She’d take real good care of things down here. Lady Ulla keeps complaining that you’ve got too many mice running around and—”
“Lady Ulla likes to complain,” Joram replied. “She hasn’t bothered to examine my kitchen; she just assumes that because there’s mice in the rest of the house, it’s the same down here. Which it ain’t! That’s ’cause I keep a kitchen that’s clean enough to eat off, and I don’t need no blasted cats to help me do it!”
“But—” Niko tried to argue.
Joram turned his back on him and plunged both hammy hands into the wad of bread dough in the kneading trough before him. Great clouds of flour rose up all around. “Look, boy, in case you ain’t noticed, I don’t like cats,” he said. “You’re the master’s son: you can order me to keep that mongrel’s food dish down here if you want, but I wouldn’t advise it. Ever wonder how come I don’t have mice in my kitchen?”
“I—I guess it’s ’cause—,” Niko began.
“Traps,” the cook said, snapping off the word as sharply as if it were the spring-loaded, back-crushing crossbar of those very devices. “Traps and . . . other ways. And if you’re fool enough to care what becomes of that worthless beast of yours, you’ll keep it out of my kitchen before it sticks its nose where it don’t belong and gets it bit off clean!”
The big oaf’s angry words frightened Niko badly. He scooped me up in his arms and held me tight to his chest. Tears were brimming in his eyes. I made a vow to repay the cook with interest for upsetting my poor, orphaned nephew so deeply.
“You wouldn’t really let anything happen to Snowball, would you, Joram?” the child asked, his voice shaking. “I’ll keep her out of your kitchen the best I can, honest I will, but what if sometime when I’m having my lessons she comes down here by accident? You’d keep her away from the traps, wouldn’t you?”
The cook said nothing, but the floury clouds thickened around him as he pounded the devil out of the bread dough.
“Joram, please say you won’t let Snowball get hurt!” Niko begged. “Please! You know how much—” A small sob shook him. “How much Mama would have loved her.”
Oh, clever Niko! And clever without actually meaning to be so, which is always the best way. I had been living in my late sister’s household long enough to know that Magda had been well loved by all of her servants, even the loutish Joram. The white clouds around him subsided as he paused in his yeasty labors and turned back to face Niko.
“Your mama was a great lady,” he said. “We won’t see her like again, that’s certain. Never was a more loving heart than hers, nor one more ready to do a good deed for a helpless living creature. She changed all I ever thought about witches and how they’re supposed to be so cold and cruel.”
“That’s ’cause you never knew any real witches until Mama,” Niko said. Poor baby, you could tell his heart was breaking over the memories of his mother, but he’d managed to salvage pride out of the pain. “None of the ones that were her friends were bad, either, but she always said that it was just the bad ones that people remembered. Please, Joram, promise you’ll be nicer to Snowball. It’s what Mama would’ve asked you to do.”
The cook’s mouth hardened. He was torn between his usual boorish nature and his abiding love for my late sister. At last he said, “All right. I won’t let nothin’ bad happen to it while it’s anywhere I can see. But that’s all.”
“You can’t just say that, Joram; you have to promise.” My little nephew could be as hard to shake as a bulldog. “You have to swear on your honor you’ll look out for her.”
“Good, good, I swear, I swear it already!” The cook raised the first two fingers of his right hand, licked them, and stroked both sides of his mustache. It was an odd gesture, but I remembered when Magda first introduced me to her new cook and told me he was a veteran mariner, newly come to her off one of the great ships in Ferdralli harbor. Sailorfolk have odd ways, Alisande, she’d said. But Joram’s got a good heart and a talent for cookery that’s just this side of sorcerous.
A good heart . . . I’d yet to see any evidence of that, beyond his fanatical devotion to my sister’s memory. I didn’t understand how Magda could have any praise at all for a man who made no secret of his hatred for cats.
Then again, I also didn’t understand how my beautiful baby sister could be dead.
The news had hit me like a thunderbolt, a shock that arrived on the doorstep of my town house in the city of Crowfield in the innocent guise of a letter from her husband, Kopp. The fact that he had written it with his own hand should have forewarned me that something was gravely wrong: Kopp never wrote to me. Kopp never wrote to anyone. He was one of Ferdralli’s wealthiest merchants, a man who left the tedious business of correspondence to his hirelings. For this, however, he had taken up the pen himself, in fingers more accustomed to forming numbers in a ledger than words on a page. He never was one to waste words any more than coins. No fine figures of speech or empty phrases of consolation cushioned the brutality of what his letter had to say. It was like reading a laundry list:
1.Magda was dead. He had come home from the waterfront to find her body sprawled across the kitchen floor.
2.He had made all the final arrangements, including her burial, and was sorry that these could not wait for me to make the long trip from Crowfield to Ferdralli and attend my sister’s funeral, but it was summer, and he thought that a woman of my intelligence didn’t need to have some things spelled out for her.
3.He was leaving Ferdralli at once on a trading voyage to Beska.
4.The children would stay home, in the expert care of their governess, Lady Ulla.
5.I was welcome to come and visit anytime I liked. He hoped I would not wait for his return to do so, since he didn’t think I wanted to see him any more than he wanted to see me.
That letter was Kopp all over, blunt as a barrel stave, practical as a pair of waterproof boots. He didn’t like me because he’d been raised to believe that all witches were evil creatures. It didn’t matter that he’d married one; you could tell just by looking at the love in his eyes whenever he gazed at my sister that he’d enthroned her in his mind as the exception that proves the rule.
I let out a groan fit to rouse the dead when I read that letter, a groan loud enough to bring my loyal servant Scalini running to see what was wrong. Scalini did not run, as a rule; for preference, he slithered. Scalini also did not work unless strictly enjoined, nagged, and browbeaten. Before my spells had summoned him from Underrealm, he had been the eldest spawn of Rax, the demon lord in charge of intentionally negligent schoolchildren. Scalini had appeared before me in a burst of flame, attended by a pack of homework-devouring hounds, and I’d slapped the indenture bondspells on him before fully determining what he was.
That was a mistake. It takes talent to raise a demon, and plenty of power to control him the instant he sets foot in this world; it’s not one of those spells you can whip out on a whim. I summoned Scalini years ago, when I was still working on a limited budget but needed some serious help around the house and in my craftwork. Demons don’t just know magic, they are magic, plus they do windows if you lay the bondspells on them properly. I thought that by summoning a demon I’d found the best and cheapest way to solve my problems. I put all my eggs into one basket, as it were, only to wind up with those same eggs all over my face. Scalini was loyal, but otherwise useless. However, he was also sympathetic, for a demon. The news of my sister’s death moved him to tears.
Tears and more.
“He did it!” Scalini thundered. “That grabpenny husband of hers did this to her. It’s no natural death she died, you mark me, mistress. Why else would the
lubberlout have her poor body shoved into the ground and get himself out of town so quick? So you can’t come and make the corpse talk to tell you how she truly died!”
I tried to assuage Scalini by telling him that I had never really gotten the hang of necromancy. Any corpse I came across would keep its secrets.
He was not to be comforted.
“And who’s this Lady Ulla when she’s at home, eh? Probably the husband’s by-the-way bed warmer.”
“Lady Ulla is an impoverished noblewoman whose family fled the kingdom of Tyrshen in the days following the Unpleasantness,” I explained. For the life of me I never did understand why folks insisted on referring to the Tyrshen bloodbath as the Unpleasantness. Due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances, the crops had failed, the dam had burst, the peasants had revolted, the Queen had died without legitimate issue, the witches had gone on strike, and the wizards had decided to throw demon armies at one another all at the same time. It was like referring to the Baby-Eating Black Dragon of Koolai as the skink.
“Tyrshen!” Scalini echoed sarcastically. “That nest of would-be wand-wielders? My folk know all about people from Tyrshen, especially the aristocrats. They’re never satisfied to leave magic to the professionals, oh no! They have to force every last one of their talentless brats to try a hand at it. So the nobles’ kids learn a spell or two, which they generally bollix up past all recognition if they’re lucky, and forever after they’re trotted out when company comes to call and told, ‘Show Auntie Inez how you turn a goldfish into a goat, darling.’ They could accomplish the same thing if they’d just give the tykes spinet lessons, and then they wouldn’t have to worry about what to do with all those goats!”
“Scalini, Lady Ulla no longer has to worry about goats, goldfish, or spinet lessons. Her whole family was wiped out and her lands seized. She’s only a governess now.”
“A governess who was taught magic in her salad days.” There was no diverting my demon. “A governess who saw that the road to success led through your brother-in-law’s bed! Your sister likely caught them at their games, made threats, and had to be gotten out of the way.”
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