and moreover was wearing a full suit of immaculate formal evening dress.
“Hey!” Lord Ermenwyr cried in outrage. “I didn’t say you could wear my clothes! You’ll get slime all over them.”
“Ha-ha, you fell for it,” Lord Eyrdway said. “I wouldn’t wear your old suits anyway; the trouser crotches wouldn’t fit me. I only copied them. It’s all me, see?” He turned to display himself. “I’m going to go out and find a party. Who’ll recognize me with clothes on?”
“Want to hear me waste advice, Smith?” said Lord Ermenwyr. “Listen: Eyrdway, don’t drink. If you do, you will begin to boast, and as you’re not at home in the land of spoiled darlings, someone will take offense at your boasting and call you out, and then you’ll kill him, and then the bad people will chase you again. You don’t want that to happen, do you, Way-way?”
“It won’t happen, Worm-worm,” his brother told him, grinning evilly. “I’m going to be clever. I’m going to be brilliant, in fact.”
“Of course you will,” Lord Ermenwyr repeated, sagging back on the cushions. “How silly of me to imagine for a moment you’ll get yourself into trouble. Go. Have a wonderful time.” He sat forward abruptly and his voice sharpened, “But those had better not be my pearl earrings you’re wearing!”
“No, I copied those too,” said Lord Eyrdway, shooting his neck forward out of his collar a good two yards so he could dangle the earrings before his brother’s eyes. “You think I’d touch something that had been in your ears? Ugh!”
“Retract yourself! The last thing I need in my condition is a close-up of your face,” said Lord Ermenwyr, swatting at him with one of the cushions. “Perfidious princox!”
“I know you are, but what am I?”
“Get out!”
“I’m going,” Lord Eyrdway said, dancing to the door, colliding with it, then flinging it wide. “Look out, Salesh; you’ve never seen true youth and beauty until tonight!”
Lord Ermenwyr gagged.
“Open a window, Smith. I’d rather not vomit all over your carpets.”
“You could do with a little fresh air,” Smith said, opening the window and letting out some of the smoke. “No wonder you stop breathing all the time.”
“It’s not my fault I’m chronically ill,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “I was born sickly. It’s Daddy’s fault, probably. He didn’t infuse me with enough of the life force when he begot me. And the rest is Eyrdway’s fault. He used to try to smother me in the cradle when Nursie wasn’t looking, you know.”
“I guess these things happen in families,” said Smith. He took up a sofa cushion and used it as a fan to wave smoke out the window.
“Oh, the horror of siblings,” Lord Ermenwyr said, closing his bloodshot eyes. “You’re an orphan, aren’t you, Smith? Lucky man. Yet you’ve got people who love you. Nobody would shed a tear if I gasped out my irrevocable last.”
“You’re just saying that because you haven’t had your medication,” said Smith encouragingly. “Where’s Willowspear, anyway?”
“Vision questing, I assume,” Lord Ermenwyr replied. “Do you know how to give an injection?”
“A what?” Smith frowned in puzzlement.
“Where you shoot medicine into someone’s arm through a needle?”
Smith blanched. “Is that a demon thing?”
“I’d forgotten your race is dismally backward in medical practice,” Lord Ermenwyr sighed. “Fetch me the green box on my dresser, and I’ll show you.”
Smith found the box, and watched in horrified fascination as Lord Ermenwyr drew out a glass tube shaped like a hummingbird, with a long needle for a beak. Removing a tiny cartridge of something poison-green from the box, he flipped up the hummingbird’s tail feathers and loaded the cartridge; then opened and shut its tiny wings experimentally, until a livid green droplet appeared at the end of the needle.
“And Mr. Hummyhum is ready to play now,” said Lord Ermenwyr, rolling up his sleeve. Taking out an atomizer, he squeezed its bulb until a fine mist of something aromatic wet his arm; then, with a practiced jab, he gave himself an injection. Smith flinched.
“There. My pointless life is prolonged another night,” said Lord Ermenwyr wearily. “What are you looking so pale about? You’re an old hand at sticking sharp things into people.”
“It’s different when you’re killing,” said Smith. “But when you’re saving a life … it just seems perverse, somehow. Stabbing somebody to keep them alive, brr!”
“Remind me to tell you about invasive surgery sometime,” said Lord Ermenwyr, ejecting the spent cartridge and putting the hummingbird away. “Or trepanning! Think of it as making a doorway to let evil spirits out of