‘Oh? What’s that?’
‘Come next summer, there’s one feller from Muros ez is gonna git hisself a quick lesson in honest. After Wilg here holds him down an’ I jump up and down on his belly fer a hour er so, he’ll be s’ honest it’ll jist make y’ sick t’ look at ‘im.’
‘I can hardly wait,’ Darral said with a broad grin.
Darral did make a quick tour of the towns and cities of northern Sendaria that winter, and the local inn was filled to overflowing with eager buyers the next summer. Over his objections, my nephew was appointed by acclamation to handle the negotiations, and the village of Annath was suddenly ankle deep in money. Our local granite, as it turned out, was of the very highest quality, and the slate, which the villagers had literally thrown away, was even better. Darral took the simplest approach to our new would-be buyers. He held an auction – ‘How much am I bid for this stack of blocks?’ and so on. Every buyer went away happy and with his wagons groaning.
The man from Muros was late that year, so he missed all the excitement, and the view of the back end of all those wagons rolling out of town. ‘Where’s the granite?’ he demanded. ‘You don’t expect me and my teamsters to load it on the wagons ourselves, do you?’
‘I’m afraid we don’t have anything for you this year, friend,’ Darral told him in a pleasant tone.
‘What do you mean, you don’t have anything?’ The mason’s voice was shrill. ‘Did every man in the whole town turn lazy? Why didn’t you let me know you didn’t have any stone for me? I’ve made this trip for nothing. This is going to cost you next year, you know. Maybe I won’t even bother next year.’
‘We’ll miss you,’ Darral murmured. ‘Not too much, but we will miss you. There’s a new procedure here in Annath, friend. We hold an auction here now.’
‘Who’d come this far for third-rate stone?’
‘There were about a dozen or so, weren’t there?’ Darral asked the other stone-cutters. ‘I sort of lost count during the bidding.’
‘You can’t do this to me!’ the Muros mason screamed. ‘We’ve got a contract. I’ll have the law on you for this!’
‘What contract?’
‘It’s a verbal contract.’
‘Oh? Who was it with?’
‘It was with Merlo, that’s who.’
The stone-cutters of Annath all burst out laughing. ‘Merlo’s been dead for five years now,’ one of them said, ‘and he was ninety-four when he died. Merlo would say anything anybody wanted him to say, if that somebody happened to be willing to buy him a tankard of beer. He was the town drunk, and his word wasn’t worth any more than the price of the last tankard of beer. If you want to take that to a lawyer, go right ahead. All you’ll get out of it is a quick lesson in real swindling. You won’t get anything from us, but that lawyer will probably get everything you own out of you.’
The stone-mason’s eyes grew desperate. ‘What about all that worthless slate I’ve been hauling away for you?’ he said. ‘I’ll take that, if you haven’t got anything else.’ His eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘I’ll have to charge you for taking it away, though. Always before, I was only doing it out of friendship.’
‘Funny thing about that slate,’ Darral said. ‘A man from Darine looked at it, and he outbid everybody else for it. We got as much for the slate as we did for the granite. Isn’t that strange? Oh, by the way, a couple of my neighbors would like to have a little chat with you.’ He looked over his shoulder at the others. ‘Has anybody seen Wilg and old Farnstal?’ he asked mildly.
‘I think they’re waiting on the road just north of town, Darral,’ one of the quarry workers replied with a sly smirk. ‘I think they want to speak privately with our friend here.’
We didn’t hear either Wilg or Farnstal when they spoke to the man from Muros, but we did hear him. They probably heard him back in Muros.
‘Is he honest now?’ Darral asked the wickedly grinning pair when they returned to town much later.
‘Jist ez honest ez a newborn lamb,’ Farnstal replied. ‘I think it might be on accounta he got hisself religion ‘bout half-way thoo our little discussion.’
‘Religion?’
‘He wuz a-doin’ a whole lotta prayin’ there along tords th’ end, warn’t he, Wilg?’
‘It sounded a lot like praying to me,’ Wilg agreed.
The celebration in Annath that night was longer and more boisterous than the one after the auction had been. Money’s all very nice, but sometimes getting even is even nicer.
Darral was the hero of Annath after that, and now we were firmly established. I don’t think in all those years that I’ve ever felt more secure. Figuratively speaking, I’d finally found my ‘cave in the mountains’.
In 5338, after we’d been in Annath for about four years, mother paid me another of those visits. ‘You’re going to have to go back to Nyissa, Pol,’ she told me.
‘Now what?’ I grumbled. ‘I thought I had that all settled.’
‘There’s a new Salmissra on the throne, Pol, and the Angaraks are taking another run at her.’
‘I think I’ll fly on down to Rak Cthol and turn Ctuchik into a toad,’ I muttered darkly.
‘It isn’t Ctuchik. This time it’s Zedar again. I think Ctuchik and Zedar are playing some obscure game with each other, and whichever one of them subverts Salmissra wins.’
‘What a bore. I’ll send for father and have him fill in for me here. Then I’ll run on down to Nyissa and settle this once and for all. This is starting to make me tired.’
I wasn’t really very polite to my father when he arrived. I overrode his objections, refused to answer his questions, and flatly told him what to do. It was probably a little blunt. I think there were faint overtones of ‘Sit! Stay!’ involved in it.
When I reached Sthiss Tor, I didn’t bother with bats or anything like that. I simply marched up to the palace door, announced who I was, and told them that I would see Salmissra. Several eunuchs tried to block my way, but that stopped when I started translocating them in all directions. Some found themselves clinging to rafters high overhead and others were suddenly out in the surrounding jungle with no memory of how they got there. Then I transposed myself into the form of that ogress that’d been so useful back on that forest road in southern Sendaria a few eons ago, and I was suddenly all alone in the corridor leading to Salmissra’s throne-room. I changed back and went on in.