Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,109
always brimmed with enthusiasm and exuberance, while it was the other, the dominant left head, that was ever urging caution. “We’ll be whipped! We’ll be flayed!”
“We are only purveyors, nothing more. We are protected by the mercantile laws. What we sell is legal, and what he plans to use it for is legal too, however deplorable. The girl is of age.”
“So he says.”
“If he’s lied to me about it, the sin is his. Do you think I would dare to ask the grandson of the Count of Canzilaine for an affidavit?”
“But even so, Ghambivole—”
“Twenty royals, Shostik-Willeron.”
They argued over it another fifteen minutes. But in the end the Vroon won, as he knew he would. He was the senior partner; this was his shop, and had been in his family four generations; and he was the only one of the two who had any real skill at wizardry. Shostik-Willeron’s sole contribution to the partnership had been capital, not any great knowledge of the art; and if the shop failed, the Su-Suheris would lose that capital. They were in no position to turn away such lucrative business, chancy though it might be.
The partners were an oddly assorted pair. Like all the Su-Suheris race, Shostik-Willeron was tall and slender, with a pallid body tapering upward to a narrow forking neck a foot in length, atop which sprouted a pair of hairless, vastly elongated heads, each of which had an independent mind and identity. Ghambivole Zwoll could hardly have looked more different: a tiny person, barely reaching as high as his partner’s shins, fragile and insubstantial of body, with a host of flexible rubbery limbs and a small head, out of which jutted a sharp hook of a beak, above which were two huge yellow eyes with horizontal black stripes to serve as pupils. There were times when the Vroon barely avoided being trampled by Shostik-Willeron as they moved about their cramped little emporium.
But Ghambivole Zwoll was accustomed to moving in a world of oversized creatures. Vroons were the dominant beings on their own home planet, but giant Majipoor was Ghambivole Zwoll’s native world, his ancestors having arrived in the great wave of Vroon immigration during the reign of Lord Prankipin, and like all his kind, he wove his way easily and lithely through throngs of heedless entities of much greater size than he, three and four and even five times his height, not only humans but also the reptilian Ghayrogs and the lofty Su-Suheris and the various other peoples of Majipoor, going on up to the gigantic shaggy four-armed Skandars, who stood eight feet tall and taller. Not even the presence of the ponderous, slow-witted Skandar cleaning-woman, Hendaya Zanzan, who moved slowly and clumsily about the shop as she dusted and fussed with its displays, intimidated him with her dangerous bulk.
“A love potion,” Ghambivole Zwoll said, setting about his task. “One that is suitable to win the heart of a highborn maiden, slender, delicate—”
The job called for no little forethought. At Ghambivole Zwoll’s request, the Su-Suheris began taking books of reference down from the high shelves, the reliable old book of incantations that Ghambivole Zwoll had kept by his side since his student days in the sorcerers’ city of Triggoin, and the ever-useful Great Grimoire of Hadin Vakkimorin, and Thalimiod Gur’s Book of Specifics, and many another volume—more, in fact, than would possibly be needed. Ghambivole Zwoll suspected that he could compound the potion that the marquis had commissioned out of his own fund of accumulated skills, without recourse to any of these books. But he wanted to take no unnecessary risks; he had a whole week to complete what he could probably deal with in a morning, but any miscalculation due to overconfidence would surely have ugly consequences, and that stupefying fee of twenty royals more than amply compensated him for any unnecessary time that he expended on the task. It was not as though he had a great many other things to do this week, after all.
Besides, he loved to burrow in the great array of wizardly materials with which his forefathers had crammed the small shop. These two centuries of professional magicking had made the place a virtual museum of the magus’s art. It was not an easy shop to find, tucked away as it was in a far back corner of the huge marketplace, but in happier days it had enjoyed great acclaim, and throngs of impatient clients had jostled elbow-to-elbow in the hall just outside, peering in at