“We do not build towns as your kind does,” the deodand explained. “We share territories, but only at a distance except for those times when we are drawn together to mate and settle grievances, the latter of which we effect by contests of strength which inevitably end in exoneration for one party, death for the other. I myself have survived a dozen such disputes. Here, see the deep scar of one such honorably concluded disagreement.” The creature raised its arm to show Lixal, but in the firelight he could make out nothing against the flat darkness of its skin. “It has never been in our nature to cluster together as your kind does or to build as your kind builds. We have always been content to take shelter where it is found. However, as I play this game of yours I begin to see advantages in the way your kind thinks. We deodands seldom plan ahead beyond the successful conclusion of a given hunt, but I see now that one of the advantages your people has over mine is this very quality of forward thinking. Also, I begin to comprehend how misdirection and even outright untruth can be useful for more than simply catching a wary traveler off-guard.” The deodand abruptly moved two spinari in the same direction, revealing a sortie he had prepared, but which had been previously hidden behind them. “As you see,” he pointed out with a baring of fangs which was the deodand equivalent of a self-satisfied smile.
Despite the creature’s unusual strategem, Lixal won again that night. He had been put on notice, however: the deodand was learning and he would have to increase the effort he put into the games if he wished to maintain his supremacy and his unbroken record. He found himself regretting, as he had many times before, that hundreds of consecutive victories in a game of skill should net him exactly nothing in the way of monetary reward. It was a suffering more poignant than anything Eliastre could have devised for him.
At last they reached the small metropolis of Catechumia, home of Twitterel’s Emporium. Lixal and the deodand paused and waited for nightfall in a glade on the outskirts of town, not far from the place where Lixal’s troop had once camped.
“Do not trouble yourself with speech when we meet Eliastre,” he warned the deodand. “It will be a tense negotiation and best served by devices I alone can bring to bear. In fact,” he said after a moment’s thought, “It may be best if you remain outside the door while I step just inside it, so that the treacherous onetime mage knows nothing of your presence and can prepare no defense against you, should I find it necessary to call upon you.”
“You have tried once already to trap me on the other side of a door, Laqavee,” the deodand said sourly. “Not only that, but it was a church door, which you thought might increase the efficacy of the strategem. And what happened?”
“You wrong me! That was weeks ago and I intend no such trickery here…!”
“You discovered you could not go forward while I remained on the other side of the door,” the creature reminded him. “Like the golden links of a magister’s cuff, we are bound together, willy-nilly — one cannot proceed without the other.”
“As far as our current plan, I desired only to keep your presence a secret at the outset,” Lixal said in a sulky voice. “But you will do as you feel you must.”
“Yes, I shall,” said the deodand. “And you would be wise to remember that.”
When midnight came they crossed town swiftly and mostly silently, although Lixal was forced to remonstrate severely with the deodand who would have eaten a drunkard he found sleeping in an alcove outside a shuttered tavern.
“He is of no interest to anyone except me,” the creature argued. “How can you prevent me when you have starved me of proper man-flesh for so long?”
“Because if we are discovered things will go badly for both of us. If the gnawed bones of even the lowliest of townsfolk come to public attention, will not the presence of such as yourself in Catechumia instantly be inferred?”
“They might suppose a wolf had snuck into town,” suggested the deodand. “Why do you continually thwart me? You will not even let me eat the flesh of the dead of your species, which your people scorn so much they bury it in the ground, far from their habitations!”
“I do not let you eat the flesh of corpses because it sickens me,” replied Lixal coldly. “It is proof that, no matter how you aspire to be otherwise, you and your ilk are no better than beasts.”
“Like those you call beasts, we do not waste perfectly edible tissues. Our own kind, at the end of their days, are perfectly happy to be returned to the communal stomach.”
Lixal shuddered. “Enough. This is the street.”
But to his great unhappiness, when Lixal approached the doorway of what had once been Twitterel’s Emporium it gave every sign of being long deserted. “Here,” Lixal cried, “this is wretched in the extreme! The coward has decamped. Let us enter and see if there is any clue to his present whereabouts.”
The deodand easily, if somewhat noisily, broke the bolt on the door and they went into the large, dark room that had once been densely packed with Twitterel-who-was-Eliastre’s stock in trade. Now nothing lined the shelves but cobwebs, and even these looked long-abandoned. A rat, perhaps disturbed by the deodand’s unusual scent, scurried into a corner hole and disappeared.
“He seems to have left you a note, Laqavee,” said the deodand, pointing. “It has your name on it.”
Lixal, who did not have the creature’s sharp vision, had to locate the folded parchment nailed to the wall by touch, then take it outside into the flickering glow of the street-lantern to read it. To Lixal Laqavee, extortionist and counterfeit thaumaturge, the missive began, If you are reading this, one of two things has occurred. If you have come to pay what you owe me, I stand surprised and pleased. In this case you may give thirteen thousand terces to the landlord of this establishment (he lives next door) and I will receive it from him at a time in the future and in a manner known only to myself. In a spirit of forgiveness, I will also warn you that at no time should you attempt the Exhalation of Thunderous Banishment on a deodand. If you have not returned to erase your debt, as I think more likely, it is because you have used the Exhalation on one of the dusky creatures, but for some reason my intention of teaching you a lesson has been thwarted and you mean to remonstrate with me. (It is possible that my transposition of two key words, because hurried, was not as damaging to the effect as I hoped. It is even remotely possible that the protective charm you wore on your wrist was more useful than it appeared, in which case I must blame my own overconfidence.) If any combination of these is the case for your return, my various curses upon you remain in force and I inform you also that I have moved my business to another town and chosen another name, so that any attempt by you to stir up trouble for me with the Council of Thaumaturgic Practitioners will be doomed to failure. You, sir, may rot in hell with my congenial approval. signed, He Who Was Twitterel
Lixal crumpled the parchment in his fist. “Repay him?” he growled. “His purse will groan indeed with the weight of my repayment. His account shall be paid to bursting!”
“Your metaphors are inexact,” the deodand said. “I take it we shall not be parting company as quickly as we both had hoped.”
Like two prisoners condemned to share a cell, Lixal and the deodand grew weary of each other’s company in the weeks and months after they left Catechumia. Lixal searched half-heartedly for news of the ex-wizard Eliastre, but he was inhibited by the constant presence of the deodand, who proved a dampening influence on conversation with most of humankind, and so he all but gave up hope of ever locating the author of his predicament, who could have set up shop anew in any one of hundreds of towns and cities across Almery or even farther countries still.