"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 ..."
"I still can't believe you got us a fifty percent discount!" Parvattani kept saying.
I whistled as I walked. "That was a pretty nice piece of negotiation," I acknowledged. "Nobody who hangs with me ever pays retail."
Massha and Chumley rolled their eyes. I had to admit that maybe I had kept repeating myself, too, but it had been a damned fine deal. Because of all the years I'd spent on Deva, all the arrangements I'd come to with other Deveels, I knew when to cut the offer and crank up the volume. About halfway through the negotiations we were yelling at one another at the top of our lungs just as if we had been in a dusty tent in the middle of the Bazaar. The low, civilized, conversational tone people generally used here in The Mall was left far behind. I found it kind of refreshing. The Deveel seemed surprised at first, but like any merchant of his species the bartering he learned at his mommy's knee came right back to him. The highest percentage I paid for any item was the first one we dealt on. After that I started a lot lower and fought a lot harder. It had been such a frustrating few days there in The Mall chasing shadows it was really nice to win at something for a change. I strutted all the way to the next store on Massha's list.
"—No, I don't want to enter a drawing," Massha exclaimed, batting at a fairy clad in diaphanous pink who fluttered beside her pushing ticket slips into her hands.
"Go 'way," Chumley ordered, swatting at the winged pest. The fairy flew hastily out of reach.
We got pestered a lot in between stops. Moa had assured me that all solicitors carried a license, a blue crystal that they had to display on demand. Most of these didn't have 'em. Rattila kept sending minions after us, some pretty, some obnoxious, some ugly and menacing, all of them nosy. I wondered how he managed to sneak all of these people in and out of the building every day. Then I realized that they looked like everybody else. For all I knew he had six shapechangers who could turn into a hundred or so customers apiece working for him.
"All the more reason," Eskina insisted, when I broached the subject, "that we be well prepared and well armed." She cocked a pocket crossbow and tucked it into her thick fur coat. It disappeared without a trace.
"What else have you got in there?" I asked, with a wicked grin.
She winked. "I must know you much better before I tell you that." "That one," Yahrayt whispered, pointing, as he hovered over the head of Lawsy, who was disguised as a Mall guide. The Flibberite female whose image she wore had been a find Rattila gloated over. Dinii was a deep-seated shopaholic who never kept track of the purchases on her employee credit card. She paid the minimum on whatever balance her statement showed. At this point she was years behind on her payments, but the card was the only one that the administration didn't have a watch on. She came in very handy when one of the mall-rats needed to be in a restricted area during business hours. Dinii's identification was all up-to-date. They had to be careful not to use Dinii up; she had to keep her job in The Mall, or the cloned pass card that was their key to going where she could go would be changed.