"Beautiful, beautiful!" Rattila applauded Garn when he got back to the Rat Hole. "What a marvelous improvisation! I enjoyed the astonished expressions on all of those faces, and the eagerness they evinced watching you. Why have we never used mass entertainment before? It was fantastic!"
"I felt stupid," Garn admitted, handing over his Skeeve card. "I mean, all those dudes looking at me? I felt like, I was shaving all my fur off in public."
Rattila clutched the small blue square to his chest. Even without the Master Card in his hand to complete the transaction the delicious energy tickled his nerve endings. "Intoxicating!" he declared. "You may not have been comfortable, but you showed a natural talent for attracting attention."
"I do?" Garn asked, blankly.
"You do." Rattila looked at the rest of the mall-rats. "I am sure each of you conceals a hidden talent like Gam's. From now on you will all do that kind of performance art with the Skeeve card, at least once a day."
"C'mon, Ratty," Strewth whined. "We're mall-rats. We shop. We don't act. We don't sing. We don't dance. I mean, it doesn't come naturally. We haven't got any talent. I mean, what's our motivation?"
The lights in the Rat Hole went out, leaving Rattila's blazing red eyes as the only source of light. Strewth and the others cowered deep into the slimy muck.
"I suggest you look deep inside yourselves for the proper motivation," Rattila intoned. "In fact, I insist. Get me a handle on the visitors! And don't call me Ratty!" "Let's see," the female Jahk beamed, floating ahead of the pack of guards up the hall like the banner before a troop of toy soldiers on parade. "Shall we try Meldrum's Magik-land, or Binnie's Spell Box?"
"Magik shopping," Wassup whispered to Yahrayt. "She must have half the guards on duty with her."
"Awesome," Yahrayt breathed. "It'll be all clear for the others to shop."
"Totally!"
Disguised as an elderly male Imp and a Klahdish child of six holding his hand, the two mall-rats fell into line behind the others.
"Goin' on a lion hunt," Wassup sang happily. A Mall guard glanced back over his shoulder. "Goin' on a lion hunt!"
"Shaddup!" Yahrayt hissed. "Mayno should never have brought that Imp's card to Rattila. He's not right in the head!"
"You don't love me?" Wassup asked, forlornly.
Yahrayt had had enough. He tugged Wassup by the ear into the flap of a nearby tent. "Change cards! Now! Anybody?'
Wassup pulled out his deck and selected one at random. The cloth around them bulged as he expanded suddenly from an undersized Imp to a full-sized Gargoyle.
"Cool," he gritted. "Yer right. I feel smarterer now."
"C'mon," Yahrayt snorted, grabbing his arm and hustling him after the file of guards, now disappearing into the crowd. "Follow that Jahk!"
"Wendell's Emporium?" Massha inquired, thumbing through the index at the back of the atlas as she hovered over the heads of the rapt guards. I was bored already with the enterprise, but it would have shown a lack of faith in my associate to split.
"So," I asked the nearest Flibberite, a skinny youth whose huge tunic was more or less wearing him, not the other way around. "How'd you decide to join The Mall security force?"
"My father was in it, sir!" snapped out the recruit. "And my father's father. And my—"
"Never mind," I interrupted him.
"Yes, let's try here," Massha suggested, levitating down to eye level.
"Hey, lady," a heavy voice grated. "Would youse mind answerin' a few survey questions?"
Massha spared a brief glance for the huge Gargoyle who shouldered through the horde of shoppers toward her bearing a clipboard. "Not right now, thanks."
"Hokay. Den would youse take dis survey, and drop it off anyplace when youse done wit' it?" The heavy fist proffered a sheet of closely printed parchment.
"Sure," Massha agreed absently, rolling up the paper and sticking it into her cleavage.
"How about youse, sir?" the Gargoyle requested, turning to me. "You gotta minute?"
"Hem!" Eskina cleared her throat.
I rolled my eyes. I didn't need the warning. I hadn't been hatched at The Mall door. "Sure, buddy? What do you want to know?"
"You gotta favorite color?" the Gargoyle asked, poised with quill in fist.
"Why do you want to know that?"
"Well... we always ask dat kinda question."
"And what do most people usually say."
"Blue," the Gargoyle answered promptly.
"Well, I ain't gonna buck the average," I insisted, in a friendly tone. "Blue's good. What else do you want to know?"
"What kinda tings you buy when you go shoppin'?"
"Whaddaya got?"
"Man, I knew you were gonna ask me dat!" The Gargoyle sucked the top of the pen thoughtfully. "Dere's clothes, shoes, toys, magik wands, posters, a real good candy store, candles, and incense—" "Hem!" This time the warning came, not from Eskina, but from a little kid with pumpkin-colored hair and a missing front tooth.
"Tanks for yer cooperation," the Gargoyle offered hoarsely. "Hey, Troll, you spend a lotta money on discretionary spending?"
Chumley let his lower lip droop. "Huh?" he asked.
The Gargoyle grunted. "Never mind. Tanks, all of youse." He stumped away, clutching his clipboard, the tot following in his footsteps. I grinned.
"You're gonna have to do better than that, Rattila."
Massha and Par finished their conference and headed for the door of Wendell's. As she passed, I reached up and plucked the survey out of her decolletage.
"Hey," she protested.
"You're not gonna need that," I informed her as I shredded the parchment and let the fragments sift to the floor.
Massha didn't need to have the whole picture painted for her. She grinned at me.
"Thanks, Green and Brainy. I'd better be more careful. If I hadn't been so busy, I might have filled it in."
TEN
"That was useless!" Rattila's voice echoed angrily in Wassup's and Yahrayt's minds. "The Pervert turned every single one of your questions back at you, you idiot!"
"Hey, don't be mad, man," Wassup protested. "Dis—I mean, this Gargoyle's a mechanic, not a census taker!"
"Try another tack!"
"Tack?" Wassup's lips moved as he tried to figure out what Rattila meant.
Yahrayt came to the rescue. "I'll figure out a way to get close to 'em, Big Cheese. Over and out."
"... And these amulets will tip you off when you're near a specific magik source," Massha continued her spate, piling silk-wrapped packets into Parvattani's arms. "Once we get ahold of one of these shapeshifters we can tune it to pick up that spell. The amulets are cheap, so they break easily— the gems are only glass—but the good thing is they're easy to replace, too. They're not like the Ring of Oconomowoc. That'd be your best tracker, but there's only one in existence, and it's in a dragon's hoard about seventeen dimensions from here."
Par's eyes had long ago glazed over from her cheerful lecture, but he passed along his burden to the next guard in line.
"And these," Massha added, gleefully seizing a handful of gleaming pebbles and letting them drop through her fingers, "are terrific for keeping you from getting lost."
"We don't need those, madame," Par ventured timidly.
"Well, sure you do ... I guess you don't," Massha corrected herself, with a sheepish grin. "Sorry. This is your stomping ground. I'll take a few, though. I guess that's all here."
Par stepped up to the counter, where a Deveel merchant was rubbing his hands together in joyful anticipation.
"I have a letter of credit from Mr. Moa," Par began, reaching into his tunic for the document.
"Wonderful, wonderful!" the Deveel crooned. "I'll just take that—"
"Hold it right there," I pronounced majestically, before he could put it on the counter.
"What do you want, Pervert?" the Deveel snarled. "This Flibberite and I were about to do business."
"That's right," I agreed. "And I'm his business agent. Now, about these amulets. Six gold pieces each is out of the question ..."