Robert Asprin - Myth-Gotten Gains

"PSST! HEY, FRIEND! Yeah, you with the green scales! Buy me!"

I looked around.

I was browsing one of the myriad jumble sales that beckoned to me, not in the Bazaar, where the voice was probably that of the innocent-looking Deveel vendor behind the table, but on market day in the town square, in a dimension called Ittschalk. I'd stopped off on a tour of the provinces just for the hell of it, where the people were covered by masses of long, wavy hair like Rastafarians and the wide-open skies were greenish.

For the first time in years I wasn't dependent on anyone else for a ride to the next dimension thanks to a gift from a friend. I was enjoying the novelty of being able to travel in my own company, staying as long as I pleased, where I pleased. If I felt like having a weeklong drunk in Pookipsie with the Pookas, I could do it. If I discovered the annual Broaching of the Casks festival in Harv was a bust, I could book out of there without having to wait around for a magician to give me a boost. liberty was more of a kick than any champagne I'd ever drunk.

The Prounvip Annual Village Fair was a forest of tents set up in a wide-open square, amid the few scattered buildings on the dusty prairie plain. An oom-pa-pa band was tuning up under a conical, blue tent in the middle of the clearing. The savory smell of frying sausages and bubbling pots of spicy chili drew my nose's attention to the stringy-haired cooks laboring over pit stoves under an adjacent pavilion. Kids were having their long locks plaited into tiny dreads and tipped off with colored beads by nimble-fingered hairdressers, or sprayed in undulating patterns with glitter that their mothers were undoubtedly hoping would wash out easily later on.

Off to one side the hairy denizens were trying their luck at shying coconuts, trying to hit inflated colored bladders with darts, or attempting to knock down a pyramid of amphorae with a stuffed cloth ball. Pretty primitive games, to my sophisticated Pervish eye, but the locals seemed to be having fun trying their luck. I wasn't sucker enough to throw away my coppers on the games, which were always rigged, at every fair in every dimension, or, from what I could see, on the merchandise set out for sale on rackety tables arranged under the hot sun for my delectation. I surveyed it all with a phlegmatic eye. Most of the stuff for sale was unmitigated junk, but I was enjoying a look anyway before checking out the quality of the local brew in the hostelry across the way. Enough of the patrons were staggering out to give me a good feeling about the place.

"Hey! Look down! Please, good fellow, get me out of here!"

I looked down. An eye peered up at me. It was reflected in the inch or so of dull silver blade protruding from the worn leather scabbard on the table. I glanced up. There was no one nearby from whom it could be reflected. Intrigued, I grasped the darkened brass hilt and pulled the sword out a few more inches. A second eye appeared reflected in the blade. They were long, steel-blue orbs outlined in black, keen and summing. I glanced up to see if it was the black-braided merchant casting a spell on the blade to make it more appealing to pass-ersby, but he was at the end, talking to an old lady covered by long, silver hair about a flowered china chamber pot.

The voice murmured again. "Thank the Smith, I thought you were never going to listen to me!"

"I heard you," I said, pleasantly. "Have a nice day."

I prepared to pass on to the next pile of goods.

The voice grew frantic. "Pray, friend, don't go! You may hear something to your advantage!"

My ears pricked up. Pervish ears are well designed to hear things to our advantage, being shaped not unlike those of bats, who can hear noises up into the highest decibels. We can hear sums well up into fifteen figures.

"What could you possibly do for me?" I asked, keeping whatever interest I might have out of my voice.

"First, friend, cleanse me of the grime of this place."

"How?" I asked.

"If there be no enemy to strike, a sharp rap upon a stone will do it."

"Why not?" I said.

I don't carry weapons. Pervects like myself are well furnished by nature with defensive armaments, such as hide tough enough to turn a fairly sharp blade, yellow claws that could as readily disembowel an opponent as poke open a can of beer, and four-inch, pointed teeth capable of ripping into anything including the cheap steaks at a truck stop. Still, I know how they're used.

Scaring the pair of arachnoids next to me into dropping their egg sacs prematurely, I swept the sword up over my head and knocked the blade on the ground. It hummed. The corrosion just exploded off it. I covered my eyes to protect them from flying rust. When the dust storm ended, I found I was clasping a gleaming brand with a blade of white-hot silver and a hilt of chased gold studded with cabochon gems of the pure colors of ruby, amethyst, emerald and sapphire that made my palms itch with unrealized profits.

The eyes, now free of the film that had veiled them, were sharper than ever. I had seen eyes like that while playing Dragon Poker, over the top of a hand of cards, as my opponent wondered if I really held an Elf-high flush, or if I was bluffing. These made an intelligent search of my person from head to feet.

"A Pervert," it said. "I have both aided and killed your kind."

"It's Pervect, you hunk of tin," I snarled.

The eyes closed briefly as if the unseen being was bowing its head in apology. "As you will. Your people have attained a higher status, then, than they had when last I saw Perv. Pray, friend, buy me, and hastily. I would be away from this place. I will see to it that you will be reimbursed tenfold."

"Tenfold, eh?" Well, that was a pretty good return on an outlay. Still, I didn't have amniotic fluid clinging to me anywhere.

"In case you didn't know it, Skinny, you're a sword. Where are you going to get the money?"

"I will tell you my story, if only you will remove me from this locale. I fear that danger may lurk about us soon."

I observed just then that more people than I had taken notice of the transformation of the flea-market sword from letter opener to museum piece. I gave them a good glare and showed my teeth. They backed away, careful to keep their hands and feet far away from my mouth. I shoved the sword back into its shabby sheath and dragged it carelessly over through the dirt to the being who owned the stall.

"Ah, good...sir," the Ittschalkian said, turning his mass of braided fur my way. He eyed me nervously, but he wasn't about to drive away a potential sale. He peered at the weather-beaten tube of leather in my hand. I kept my fingers wrapped tightly around the hilt. "I see you have chosen one of my favorite artifacts. I am sure you appreciate its value."

"I sure do," I said. "Five gold pieces, and not a copper more."

"Five?!" the man asked, his face transforming spectacularly from oily accommodation to outrage. "How could you ask me to part with a family heirloom for a mere five coins, scaly sir? It's worth at least forty!"

I always thought it was amusing how a shopkeeper could set out a tableful of crap, ignore it unless it was being openly stolen, abuse it to his friends and family as the garbage it was, then instantly start spouting the woe-is-me-my-family-will-starve line. I'd heard the litany so often I could recite it along with him. If the guy's a good salesman, I will sometimes join in the banter just to enjoy the show, but this clown had no natural style. He was clearly one of the guys who'd bought the course advertised on the back of a magazine that was headlined, "If you can draw Sparky, you, too, can be a filthy huckster!" He just didn't have it in him. Besides, I wasn't in the mood.