out. Had more gold socked away in the First Bank of Mount Flame than Freskin the Dictator! Eyrdway’s quite taken with pretending to be a famous scandalmonger. Plans to masquerade as Coppercut a bit longer.”
“Is that safe?” Mrs. Smith inquired. “Given the enemies Mr. Coppercut had?”
“Probably not,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “If he’s sensible, he’ll hit the bank first, pay back Daddy, then party the rest of the fortune away before anyone suspects he’s an imposter. That’s what I told him to do. Will he listen? Or will I run into him in some low bar in six months’ time, ragged and grotesquely daubed with cosmetics, vainly attempting to interest potential buyers? I can but hope.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke and smiled at it beatifically, as though he beheld a vision of fraternal degradation therein.
“You must have been horrible little children,” said Mrs. Smith, shaking her head.
“Utterly, dear Mrs. Smith.”
“Did your lord brother clean out your bathroom before he left?” Smith inquired cautiously.
“Of course he didn’t,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “He never cleans up any mess. That’s for law-abiding little shrimps like me, or so I was informed when I attempted to get him to at least take a sponge to the ring in the tub. I just smiled and offered him the contents of Mr. Coppercut’s traveling medicine chest. He was delighted, assuming it was full of recreational drugs. Since bothering to read labels is also only for law-abiding little shrimps, he’ll be unpleasantly surprised to learn that Mr. Coppercut suffered from chronic constipation.”
“So your bathroom…”
“Oh, don’t worry; I had the boys scrub down the walls. Only a medium could detect that anything unpleasant happened there now,” Lord Ermenwyr said.
“And the…”
“Got rid of them last night. We collected all the, er, odds and ends and crept down to your back area drain under cover of darkness. Dumped them in and pitched most of a barrel of Scourbrass’s Foaming Wonder in after them. Poof!” Lord Ermenwyr blew smoke to emphasize his point. “All gone, except for a couple of indignant shades, and I gave them directions to the closest resort in Paradise, with my profound apologies and a coupon for two free massages at the gym. But, Smith, I meant to ask you—where does that drain empty out?”
“Oh, not on the beach,” Smith assured him. “It goes straight into the sea.”
“You’re dumping sewage and caustic chemicals into the sea?” Lord Ermenwyr frowned.
“Everybody does,” said Smith.
“But… your people swim in that water. They catch fish in it.”
Smith shrugged. “The sea’s a big place. Maybe all the bad stuff sinks to the bottom? It’s never caused a problem for anybody.”
“And maybe you’re all being slowly poisoned, and you don’t realize it,” said Lord Ermenwyr. He looked panicked. “Nine Hells! I’ve been drinking oyster broth here!”
“Oh, it’s perfectly wholesome,” said Mrs. Smith.
“But don’t you see—” Lord Ermenwyr looked into their uncomprehending faces. He groaned. “No; no, you don’t. This is one of those cultural blind spots, isn’t it? Mother’s always on about this. She says you’ll all destroy yourselves one of these days with just this sort of heedlessness, and then Daddy says ‘Well, let them, and good riddance,’ and then they start to quarrel and everyone runs for cover. Look, you can’t just keep pouring poison into your ocean!”
“Well, where else can we put it?” Smith asked.
“Good question.” Lord Ermenwyr tapped ash from his smoking tube. “Hmm. I could ensorcel your sewage pipes so they dumped into another plane. Yes! Though, to do any real good, I’d need to put the same hocus on all the sewer pipes in town…”
“But then the sewage would just back up in somebody else’s plane,” Mrs. Smith pointed out.
“Unless I found a plane where the inhabitants liked sewage,” said Lord Ermenwyr, packing fresh weed into the tube and lighting it with a fireball. He puffed furiously, eyes narrowed in speculation. “This is going to take some planning.”
“I’m sure you’ll come up with something,” said Mrs. Smith. “I’d imagine your lady mother will be very proud of you.”
Lord Ermenwyr looked disconcerted at the idea.
Across the terrace, picking their way between the tables with some awkwardness because they seemed unable to let go of each other, came Willowspear and Burnbright.
“We need something,” said Burnbright.
“That is—with your permission, sir—” said Willowspear.
“What he wants to know is, there’s a dirt lot on the other side of the area where we keep the dustbins, and it’s got nothing but weeds on it now, so couldn’t we make a garden there?” said