Dennis moved about the grand hall, casually watching the rich people bow and make convoluted compliments to each other. They traded their gifts with elegant gestures of surprise and feigned spontaneity.
Arth had explained it to him. The receiver of gifts was caught in a bind. Covetousness was counterbalanced against caution. A rich man might desire a beautiful, ancient thing but fear the investment of man-hours it would take to maintain it. A gift received had to be displayed later, and any deterioration would bring terrible shame.
It was like watching an elegant pavane. Several more times Dennis saw unmistakable chagrin on the face of a recipient who had made a false move, and received too much.
At the station being manned by Arth, the brandy cask had just been opened. Servants were circulating small goblets of amber-colored fluid. A chain of gasps and coughing exclamations rippled across the crowd, just behind the waiters.
Dennis looked for Linnora. Maybe here, at the party, he would have a chance to explain to her that he was not from a land of monsters. He had to convince her that by playing a waiting game he could become so necessary to Kremer that one L’Toff prisoner would be meaningless to him in comparison. Dennis was certain he could win Linnora’s release within a few months.
But there was no sign of the Princess in the crowd. Perhaps later, he hoped.
The minor nobles and guildmasters—most of them sons and grandsons of men who had helped Kremer’s father seize power—moved about with their wives, followed by personal servants who modeled the gifts their masters had been given. It was like watching a crowd filled with sets of almost identical twins, only the sibling apparently bearing more riches always walked behind the less heavily laden, and the one wearing all the flashy junk never partook of food or drink.
Dennis had managed to beg off being assigned a “tail,” as the accompanying servants were called. It was bad enough knowing that someone, somewhere, was spending hours practicing Dennis’s formal outfits for him. He didn’t want to have to force another fellow to take on such a disgusting role, no matter how well accepted it was here.
Anyway, it helped establish Dennis as an anomaly. By now everyone knew he was a foreign wizard. The more conventions he broke, Dennis figured, the better the precedent and the less likely they’d try to hold him to other tribal stupidities.
Not stupidities, he reminded himself—adaptations! The patterns of behavior all fit when one thought of combining feudalism with the Practice Effect. One might not like them, but the rituals did make a certain amount of brutal sense.
“Wizard!”
Dennis turned and saw that Kremer himself was motioning him over.
Nearby stood Deacon Hoss’k in his bright red robes, and a crowd of local dignitaries. Dennis approached as he was bid and gave Kremer a calculatedly respectful nod.
“So this is the magician who has shown us how to practice wine into… brandy.” A richly dressed magnate held up his goblet in admiration. “Tell me, Wizard, since you seem to have found a way to practice consumable items, will you now teach us to turn cornmeal into rickel steak?”
The fellow laughed loudly, accompanied by several of those around him. He had obviously already had a fair sampling of Dennis’s first product.
Baron Kremer smiled. “Wizard, let me introduce you to Kappun Thsee, magnate of the stonechoppers’ guild, and Zuslik’s selectman for the Assembly of our Lord, King Hymiel.”
Dennis bowed just a little. “Honored.”
Thsee nodded slightly. He tossed back the brandy in his glass and motioned to a servant for more.
“You did not answer my question, Wizard.”
Dennis didn’t know what to say. These people had a fixed way of looking at things, and any explanation he gave would involve new assumptions the Coylian aristocrats were ill prepared to hear.
Anyway, at that moment he saw Princess Linnora enter the room, accompanied by a servant.
The crowd near the entrance parted for her. When she nodded and spoke to someone, the response was almost always an exaggerated, nervous smile. In her wake people frankly stared. She stood out brilliantly in the sea of flushed, anxious faces, cool and reserved as her mountain people were reputed to be.
“I am afraid that is not the way of it, my dear Kappun Thsee.”
Dennis turned quickly and saw that it was the scholar Hoss’k who had spoken, filling the long pause in the conversation. Dennis had had a brief illusion that it had been Professor Marcel Flaster, somehow transported directly from Earth, beginning one of his infamous, ponderous lectures.
“You see,” Hoss’k expanded. “The wizard has not improved wine into brandy. He has used wine much as your stonechoppers use flint nodules. He makes brandy by infusing it with new essence.”
Kappun Thsee’s eyes shone with ill-concealed greed. “The guild that gains the license to this art—”
Baron Kremer laughed out loud. “And why should this wonderful new secret be given to any of the present guilds? What, my friend, does chopping stone have to do with creating liquor with the flavor of fire?”
Kappun Thsee flushed.
Dennis had been trying to keep track of Linnora’s progress through the crowd. He quickly turned back as Kremer put his arm over his shoulder.
“No, magnate Thsee,” Kremer said, grinning. “The new essences brought to us by our wizard might be divided up among the present guilds. Then again, perhaps each should have its own, new guild. And who better to be guildmaster than he who brought these secrets to us?”
One of the women gasped. The other aristocrats stared.
In the silent moment Dennis suddenly saw with perfect clarity what was going on.
Kremer was manipulating them beautifully! Holding out the possibility of access to a whole set of new “essences,” he was accompanying the carrot with an implied stick. He already had the monopolistic guilds on his side. Now they’d positively be baying to do his will.
At the same time, Dennis realized that Kremer had just offered him more wealth and power than he had ever imagined.
He saw that even the ebullient Hoss’k was subdued, as if he were seeing Dennis in a new light—less as his own personal discovery and more, perhaps, as a dangerous rival.
That suited Dennis fine. The man had been the direct cause of stranding him on this crazy world. He had already promised himself to teach Hoss’k a lesson.
Dennis noticed that Linnora had come closer but was avoiding approaching the area where the baron stood. He turned to Kremer. “Your Grace, some may think that my brandy is nothing but a more potent form of wine. May I perform a demonstration to prove that it is, indeed, something truly different?”
Kremer nodded, betraying a faint smile.
Dennis called for a brandy-filled goblet and a small table to lay it on. Then he reached into the folds of one of his fancy sleeves and pulled out a bundle of small sticks, each painted at one end with a blob of crusty paste.
It had taken him days to hunt down and purify the right materials to perform this demonstration. It would be just the sort of thing to solidify his reputation.
“Baron Kremer spoke of the flavor of fire. From the way some of our local notables are weaving about the hall, it certainly seems that the blood in their veins has grown more than a little warm.”
The crowd laughed. Indeed, several magnates had already become tipsy, falling prey to other players of the gift-giving game. Their servants were stumbling under quantities of fine, ancient things that would ruin their masters in expensive practice time.
Dennis noticed that Linnora watched from a nearby pillar. She had smiled at the reference to the foolish guildsmasters.