A Circle of Celebrations: The Complete Edition (2 page)

“Why?” I asked.

The expression changed to one that he probably aimed at young recruits who had said something monumentally stupid.

“If I knew that, I would apologize and promise never to do it again. As it is,” he added with a sigh, “I’m in the dark. She hasn’t talked to me for a week. She hasn’t even looked at me. That’s not like her. We don’t even.…” His cheeks flushed. “Never mind, son. Need to know. It can’t go on like this. The palace isn’t that big. We keep running into each other, and people are starting to talk. You know the Queen’s on her side. She could make it pretty miserable for me if she thinks I’m making Massha unhappy. So, I’m using Affection Day as an excuse to try and break through the barrier. My concern is that she’ll throw my present back in my face.”

I became worried. Massha was someone I cared about, too.

“Can I help?” I asked. He held up the handful of pink satin. I backed away a pace with my hands held up to ward it off. “I mean, I can’t help you choose a gift. I’m not good at buying present for people.”

“Oh, this?” Hugh looked at it with a faint air of embarrassment. “I thought she’d look good in it.” He spread the garment out with both hands. It appeared to be a pair of tiny panties with little white feathered wings affixed at each hip. The wings fluttered.

“That?” I asked, in astonishment. Massha was a lady of monumental proportions, who favored harem pants and brief tops that left her broad stomach bare to help keep her cool. “That wouldn’t cover very much of her, would it?”

Badaxe grinned. “That’s kind of the idea, Skeeve. I love the way she looks. But I’m in pretty deep muck. If you’ve seen something else in here that she’d like better, I’m open to ideas.”

“She collects jewelry, mostly magikal gizmos,” I offered. “If I was going to buy her something it would be a device she doesn’t have yet.”

“I don’t know a quarter of what her magik stuff does,” Badaxe said glumly. “I had better stick to a present that shows her I’m sorry even if I don’t know what I’m being sorry for.”

“I’d be happy to run interference for you,” I said. “Massha’s been a good friend, as have you.”

He eyed me with sideways speculation.

“Would you be willing to deliver gifts to her for me?” he asked.

“Sure.” I knew the castle well. Massha occupied the position I had vacated as Court Magician to the Kingdom of Possiltum. She used my old offices, a majestic suite of rooms in the best tower. I also knew the honeymoon cottage that she and Badaxe had been given by the queen as a wedding present.

“Great!” A jubilant Badaxe grabbed me by the arm and dragged me toward the racks of clothing.

“Wait a minute!” I protested. “I didn’t say I’d dress up!”

“If you’re an Affection Day messenger, you need to wear the uniform,” Badaxe said. “Are you a soldier in this being’s army, or aren’t you?”

“What’s going on?” Aahz appeared from the midst of the racks. Hastily, he shoved a bright green and black satin corset into his basket, where it disappeared.

“Hey, Aahz,” Badaxe said, his face dropping into a relatively neutral expression. He and Aahz had a cordial relationship. As hard as I had tried, I couldn’t get them to warm to each other. “Skeeve just offered to do me a favor.”

“What kind of favor?” Aahz asked, always mistrustful of my ability to negotiate on my own behalf. All right, most of the time he was right, but I was pretty sure that I had agreed to a fairly innocuous task.

“Affection Day messenger,” I said. “Badaxe needs me to bring some presents to Massha.”

Aahz grinned, showing all of his teeth.

“And you need the uniform,” he said, hooking his hand into my other arm. “Well, come on, partner. After you drop the general’s parcels off, I’ve got a few addresses I’d like you to visit.”

“Uh … okay.”

“He looks like a medium long,” Badaxe said, running an experienced eye up and down my lanky frame.

“No problem.” Aahz plunged into the racks of clothing.

O O O

“Are you sure I need all of this stuff?” I asked, looking at myself in a red-framed magik mirror that showed my front, sides and back in rapid sequence, over and over again. I stood on a hovering disk at one side of the shop. My own clothes were in a heap on the floor. I now wore a knee-length red tunic over white trousers, belted with a leather belt from which hung a quiverful of pink feathers. Over one shoulder, a shining white bow was slung by its slack string. Over the other was a huge, empty pink satchel. “What are the bow and arrows for? Do I have to shoot my way out of the room?”

“They’re traditional symbols of Affection Day,” Valentinius said, fussing around me. “You shoot the arrows of love at the heart of the person you want to win.”

“How is a fatal assault romantic?” I asked, aghast. This was definitely not a holiday on Klah. “Am I missing something?”

The Deveel stood up and put his hands on his hips and sent an exasperated look to Badaxe. “Are you sure you want him for your messenger? He doesn’t seem to understand anything.”

“He’s fine,” Aahz snarled. The Deveel backed off, not eager to face off against a Pervect, even in his own shop. He didn’t know that Aahz had no magikal powers. “Get on with the fitting. You’re wasting time.”

“Yes, yes.”

Valentinius pointed a sharp nail at the pink boots he had had me don. From the heels sprang little white wings. To my surprise, when they fluttered they lifted me right off the disk. He snapped his fingers. A short cylindrical box about a foot across rushed to his hands. He pried off the lid and extracted, from a tissue-paper nest within, a red hat. I was not too fond of hats, which was lucky because I hardly ever needed one in the desert climate. I had also never been noted for my sartorial style. Most of my clothes had been picked out by Bunny, currently president of M.Y.T.H., Inc., once she had managed to convince me that I was a self-inflicted fashion victim. But even I wouldn’t have tried on, let alone bought, the topper that Valentinius brandished at me. It had a flat, round crown with a silver bill that stuck out over the forehead. The band that ran around the brim had a pattern of jewels arranged in stripes of pink, red and white that flashed in sequence. Sticking up over one ear was a long, fluffy pink feather with a jeweled clip. The end of the feather bobbed up and down as if in time to the flashing gems.

“No,” I said, firmly. “Not if my life depended on it. I’ll wear it without the hat.”

“But you have to!” Hugh Badaxe said, desperation in his eyes.

“Why does it matter?” I asked. “I’ll travel back to Klah, flutter over to the castle, present your gifts to Massha, then go visit Aahz’s … friends. I don’t need the hat.”

“It’s part of the spell,” Valentinius said, exasperated. He flipped a hand. The hat shot toward me. I ducked, but it clapped itself onto my head. I clawed at it, prying at the smooth felt. The hat almost cackled at me in triumph. I couldn’t get it off. It held on tighter than my hair. The Deveel pointed at me. “Now, repeat after me:

In darkest day,

in bleakest night,

no lover shall escape delight.

No rain deter,

nor snow prevent me

bringing your Affection Day present.”

“That’s stupid,” I said. “It doesn’t really rhyme.”

“Say it,” Aahz gritted.

When the veins in his yellow eyes protruded, it meant Aahz was about to lose his temper. I repeated it.

The moment the last syllable left my lips, I felt magikal power surge downward from the hat and upward from the wings on my heels. The string of my bow vibrated in a higher and higher tone until my ears were pleading for mercy. I tried to fling away the parts of the costume, but they seemed to have become part of my body.

Aahz and Badaxe stuffed the contents of their shopping baskets into the pouch.

“One last thing,” Badaxe said. He shoved aside a section of his breastplate, took one of the arrows out of my quiver, gritted his teeth, and plunged the arrow into his heart. I was aghast, but the arrow melted away, leaving no visible wound. The feathers fluttered to the floor. “That’s so she knows I really love her.”

“This is crazy!” I shouted, over the now deafening whine of the bowstring.

“Have a nice trip, partner,” Aahz said. “Tell Massha hello for me.”

“Thanks, Skeeve,” Badaxe said.

I managed to choke out words in spite of the juddering.

“But how am I going to get back to …?”

Bamf!

“Yiiii!” I yelped, as I appeared in Klah, or, rather, high over it. In all the times we had traveled to my home dimension, we had always landed somewhere on the ground. For the first time, I arrived up in the sky. It took me a minute to get my bearings. I spun in mid-air, looking for landmarks. Below was thick forest. It ran unbroken in all directions except for a snaking line that I knew had to be a road. My eye followed it until I spotted pennants and banners floating from the conical tops of towers. One of them I knew almost as well as I knew my own name, since I had lived in it for several months. The castle! I leaned toward it.

The wings on my feet had been designed to keep me in the air, but not necessarily on an even keel.

“Whoa!”

I windmilled my arms, but I found myself flying upside down in the direction of the castle. The bag full of presents started to slip off my shoulder. I caught the strap just in time and hung onto it.

To save myself, I needed a supply of magik energy from force lines. In a dimension like Deva, they’re everywhere, both underground and in the sky. In Klah, there were far fewer. I used my inner eye to scan for them. The nearest high-level one, a thin blue wavy arch, was miles away. Underground, I sensed a spiky red stripe zigzagging along almost parallel to the road. Aahz warned me to be cautious about the streams from which I drew power, but it was the only one handy.

Other than making my ears burn and my tongue vibrate, the power seemed pretty innocuous. I drew enough to fill my inner reserves. Once I’d done that, it was easy to flip myself upright and settle my bag over my shoulder.

“Wizard ho!”

“Prepare to defend!”

As I neared the edge of the forest, I spotted a number of men-at-arms in the small village that lay at the foot of the castle mount. I waved to them. Then, I realized they wouldn’t recognize me. Skeeve the Magnificent, former court wizard, was an elderly and forbidding figure, with hollow eyes and a domelike skull, dressed in dark, mystical robes, not the ridiculous young blond Klahd in red wearing a glittering hat band and armed with a quiver of pink arrows.

The soldiers formed into three lines, each with crossbows aimed in my direction.

“No, wait!” I shouted. “I’m a friend! A friend of Massha’s! Don’t—!”

Too late, a flight of bolts shot in my direction. I spread my hands and created a force shield large enough to protect me and ducked behind it. The bolts hit the shield point-first and bounced off.

“Sorcery! Call for the wizard!” came another cry.

“No!” I shouted. The second volley came flying. One of the quarrels glowed blue. Putting the shield over my back, I spun and made back for the forest. The other bolts kept sailing in a straight line, but the blue quarrel followed me as I wove between the trees. It grew closer and closer. No amount of magik that I threw at it dispelled it or made it fall. It had to be one of Massha’s gizmos.

I dodged between a couple of trees that were so close together that half of the plume on my hat rubbed off against the bark on my right. The bolt shot through the gap with ease. I made for an enormous black-leaved beechoak I spotted ahead of me. When I was a foot away, I dodged hard to the right. The bolt didn’t correct its trajectory in time. It buried itself deep in the beechoak’s trunk. A high-pitched tone began to rise from the tree. I put all the power I had left into thrusting myself away from it. I was less than twenty feet away when the beechoak exploded into a cloud of toothpicks. Thousands of them peppered my back and legs.

“Agggh!”

I plunged toward the forest floor and gathered more power from the spiky force line. I used handfuls of the magik to remove all the prickly projectiles from my skin. This time, I’d make the approach to the castle in disguise.

O O O

“Delivery?” Massha asked, as the courtier leading me up the winding staircase to the Court Magician’s tower introduced me. She eyed me up and down without a hint of recognition. The page hadn’t known me, either. I had assumed the humble garb of a peddler’s boy, with a homespun tunic that drooped to my knees and a peaked hood so large that it covered most of my face. I held my bulging delivery bag out toward her. “I’m not expecting any deliveries, and I’m not paying any cash on delivery, pal. You can take that back where it came from.”

My former apprentice had not changed her attire or her attitude just because she had taken on a lofty position. She was as tough as an Impish bannock, at least on the outside. As it was high summer in Klah, which is to say that it wasn’t as cold as usual, she had on a pair of floaty blue trousers and an ornate vest to match that bared her entire midriff. She wore velvet slippers embroidered in gold with the queen’s crest. Her bright orange hair was pulled into a knot on the top of her head.

I pulled at my forelock, which I had made seem greasy and possibly infested with vermin.

“Your pardon, my lady, but it’s just a gift.”

“A gift?” Massha’s eyes widened. “Get out! Go away!” She twisted a ring on her finger, and the door slammed in our faces.

“Wait!” I shouted, leaping forward to pound on the door. “Massha, it’s me! Skeeve! Open up!”

Although his face twisted with revulsion at my oily and filthy appearance, the page darted his hands at me to pull me away from the Court Magician’s door.

“Guards!” he shouted.

I dropped my disguise in favor of another one. The page gawked and dropped to one knee. “My lord Skeeve the Magnificent!”

“It’s all right, Bodin,” I said, in the sepulchral tones I had used while wearing that face.

Massha flung open the door. She enveloped me in a crush of soft flesh.

“Skeeve! I am so glad it’s you!”

I dragged my face out of the expanse of her shoulder and gasped in a deep breath.