"Aahz!" one of them hissed. His black-bead eyes gleamed with pleasure. "You're back! Have another drink!"
"No, thanks, Sllisssiik," I said. "Just here to make a pit stop."
Sllisssiik aimed his tongue toward the doors at the rear of the room. "On the left, but watch your step. Tktktksssni went back to shed his skin and disgorged the prey he'd engulfed all over the floor."
"Poltroon," the sword said, sulkily. "Not one of those caitiffs back there was armed with anything sharper than a butter knife, and you whisk me away from the only good fight I have seen in ten years."
I glared. "Shut up, or I'll use you to shave with."
"Who's your friend?" asked Sllisssiik, blinking at the blue eye that stuck up over the torn edge of the leather scabbard.
"Ersatz am I," the sword said.
"Cool." The Bonhommey giggled and slid back to the floor.
The sword returned its keen gaze to me. "Well, friend Aahz, if you return to Ittschalk you will walk into a fight. I would gladly be at your side, but you say you care not for a hearty battle. Misadventure has thrown us together. What say we cast our lots into fate's wind?"
"The only 'lots' I'm interested in is the money you owe me," I pointed out.
The blue eyes were wistful. "Alas, I cannot repay my debt to you if you do not carry me to my friend Kelsa's side. If you'd lief not, I would understand, but we both feel strongly. I care not for being in debt, and you do not care to be owed. Indulge me yet one more time, friend Aahz. You will not regret it."
"I regret it already." My temper was up. I missed my snack, my third beer, and my quiet walk around the town. I wanted a vacation, and instead I got a sword that speaks fluent Forsooth. If I bent it into paperclips I couldn't get my ten gold pieces back. I stuck my finger at the blade between the eyes where its nose would be, if it had a nose. "All right, I'll give you one chance. How do I find your crystal friend?"
"She is in Ori."
BAMF!
It had been about twenty years since I last visited Ori. Nice enough dimension, but the rice beer didn't have the hit of good sake, and the women weren't interested in a guy with scales. Too bad, because they were a nice bunch of pussycats.
We appeared at the edge of Perrt, the second-largest town. Getting by the sentry box at the main gate took only a moment. The guards, who resembled enormous, sinewy black leopards, inspected my baggage, which consisted of one talkative sword, cash and the toothbrush in my pocket, and rubbed their jaws along my thigh, scent-marking me to indicate I'd passed inspection.
"Kelsa has spent the last hundred or so years counseling the great seer Ori Ella," Ersatz explained as I followed his directions through the maze of streets that wound in between the white painted plastered houses. "She is a great wisewoman, who has made good use of my friend's gifts."
I was a whole lot less interested in her gifts than I was in ridding myself of my talkative companion. We dodged a huge cart full of silver fish each the size of my torso, and the parade of Orion shoppers following behind it with an insane gleam in
their eyes. I had the urge—resistible, fortunately—to yell "Here, kitty, kitty! Din-dins!" I quite rightly judged it would be the last thing I ever did. It would have picked the fight of a lifetime with the locals, who were touchy about their resemblance to the small animal that was a house pet in over a hundred other dimensions. Ersatz would have been thrilled about it. While I walked he told me tales of his past derring-do, and he had a million of them, literally. Still, as I watched those long tails switching avidly on those furry behinds as they followed the fish cart, it would have been fun.
"...It was a sight you might have relished, friend Aahz. There they were before us, sixteen black-masked ruffians, each with six swords clutched in their many hands. They moved in upon us. I guided the hand of my young ward. Up, to guard in prime! Over hand, stabbing downward, into the vital midsec-tion of the first attacker. My blade passed right through the body and out the back into the lowest right wrist of another villein, severing the hand. Back out! My wielder drew me over his head in a two-handed stance and brought me down and around, spinning. I turned my blade so my sharpest edge was outward, and we severed the necks of three of them on the spot. Hah!"
I held up a hand to put an end to the spate. "Are we going the right way?" I asked.
The keen eyes surveyed the streets. "Aye. We are within a street's length. Do you turn left at the clock tower which yon felinoids are stropping their talons upon, and we will be upon Ella's doorstep in no more than a dozen paces."
I have good eyesight, but it took another hundred feet before I focused on the shapes at the base of the tower. He was right. The clock tower looked like a popular meeting spot for the citizens of Perrt, a hundred or so of whom were spaced out around its square base, claws out and raking hard at the surface, which seemed to be made of a soft stone. From hundreds of years of wear it had been carved into long narrow ridges like corduroy. The Orions gossiped as they clawed, and
came away from the walls with their fingernails honed to fine points and ears full of the latest news, the local variation on the old water cooler. I skirted them and counted twelve paces to the second doorstep.
"Mount here, good Aahz," Ersatz said. "Kelsa is within."
Ori Ella's tabby housemaid answered the door and left us in the hallway. I had given her my name, but told her I'd state my business to the mistress of the house. She took that without question. I would have bet that over 80% of visitors did the same thing. Either the seer would know all about us without having to be told, or she was a charlatan, and she'd get out of me what she could read from my body language when we met.
Apparently, Kelsa was good at choosing the company she kept. The arched door at the end of the hall burst open, and an Orion with pure white fur came bustling toward me, shimmering blue and green robes fluttering in her wake. She had huge blue-green eyes with vertical pupils that were open into wide ovals.
"Oh, Mr. Aahz, Kelsa has talked of nothing but you for the last two hours! Where is he? Oh, yes, I forgot!" She tittered, and put a coy paw to her breast. "You don't know me, and you don't trust me. I'm Ella. Welcome! Where is Ersatz?"
She was the real thing. I was impressed. In my experience, fortune tellers were either deluded sensitives who thought the voices in their head had some mystical significance, or scam artists who used a combination of psychology, body reading and shrewd guesses to tell the customers what they wanted to hear. I hadn't mentioned the sword's name since we hit the dimension, so she could not have heard it from an agent or a spy-eye. I hiked Ersatz a foot or so out of his scabbard. His eyes gleamed.
"Honored, my lady," the sword said.
"A pleasure," the seer replied, beaming down at him. "Both of you, come right this way! Oh, we have felt for weeks that monumental changes were upon us. I am only glad that you
were able to get here so quickly. I've had a dreadful feeling that something was going to go wrong, but I'd rather be wrong about being wrong. Don't you agree?"
Still babbling, she swept around and led us toward the door from which she had emerged. I followed in her wake, rolling my eyes.
The house might have been a mansion, but the room she led us to could have been any gimcrack psychic's tent anywhere in the cosmos. The room was lit with candles in sconces. The wicks all smoked like sportscasters. The air was thick and tasted of cheap paraffin. All the furniture was covered with loud-colored silk throws, three or four to an item, so that a customer had to plant his feet firmly on the floor to keep from sliding off. There was lots of it. I had to watch my step in the dimness to avoid bumping into little tables filled with useless knickknacks that would have made any Victorian auntie beam with pride of ownership, like a clock shaped like a tarantula that told time with two of the arms, and a bronze ceramic vase so ugly I was surprised it hadn't scared the petals off the flowers in it. Amid the tables were four or five bureaus and a dozen upholstered chairs with stiffly upright backs. The portraits on the walls were of the Angry Ancestors school of art. I got glared at by assorted curmudgeonly Orions of both genders in various weird costumes, informing me that Ella wasn't the first one in her family to lack dress sense. I glared back.