your difficult task," Ezekiel concluded formally. "It's of course an honor to meet so powerful a colleague as yourself."
He left the room, and Joe closed the door behind him.
Joe took a deep breath. Well, he was still alive, which he wouldn't've bet would be the case a few minutes ago.
"Ah," he said to the bed. "You can come out now."
The folded comforter lay so flat that for an instant Joe thought the girl had been spirited away—which fit the way other things had been happening, though it wouldn't've improved his mood.
"Oh, bless you, sir," said her muffled voice as the feathers humped. The girl slipped out and stood before him again.
She wasn't really a girl. Her face was that of a woman in her mid-twenties, maybe a few years younger than Joe. Her slight form and, even more, her air of frightened diffidence made her look much younger at a glance.
"I'll . . ." she said. "I think it's safe for me to leave now. Bless—"
"Wait a darn minute!" Joe said. He put out his arm to stop her progress toward the door, then jerked back—furious with himself—when he saw the look of terror flash across her face.
"Look," he said, "I'd just like to know your name—"
"Mary, sir," she said with a deep curtsey. When she rose, she was blushing.
"For God's sake, call me Joe!" he said, more harshly than he'd meant.
Joe cleared his throat. His new fur garments were stacked in a corner. He donned a cloak as much to give his hands something to do as for the warmth of it. "And, ah," he said, "maybe you can give me a notion of what's going on? I mean—"
He didn't mean Glam and Groag, as Mary's expression of fear and distaste suggested she thought he did.
Joe understood the brothers well enough. They were jocks in a society which put even fewer restrictions on jock behavior than did a college dorm.
"No, no," Joe said, patting her thin shoulder. "Not that. Just tell me if what Ezekiel said about the dragon's true. And who is Ezekiel, anyway?"
"Why, he's the royal sorcerer," Mary said in amazement. "And a very powerful one, though nowhere near as powerful as you, Master Joe. It would take Ezekiel weeks to turn somebody into a frog, and I'm sure he doesn't know how to deal with the dragon."
"Oh, boy," Joe said. From the look behind Ezekiel's eyes when they talked, the magician had been contemplating the start of a multiweek project that would leave him with one fewer rival—and the moat with one more frog.
"I'm sure he must really hate you, Master Joe," Mary said, confirming Joe's guess. "Of course, Ezekiel doesn't really like anybody, though he does things for Glam and Groag often enough."
Does this palace even have a moat?
"Look, Mary," he said "is Delendor the only guy trying to kill this dragon, then? Isn't there an army or—you know, something?"
"Well, many brave knights have tried to slay the dragon over the years," Mary said, frowning at the unfamiliar word "army." "And sometimes commoners or even peasants have attacked the beast, but that didn't work either. So now there's . . . well, Glam and Groag say they've been spying out the dragon's habits, but I don't think anybody really wants to get near it."
A look of terrible sadness crossed the woman's face. "Except for Prince Delendor. He's serious. Oh, Master Joe, you will save him, won't you?"
Joe smiled and patted the woman's shoulder again. "We'll see what we can do," he said.
But dollars to doughnuts, there was damn-all a freelance writer could do about this problem.
Joe waited in his room; at first in the expectation that Delendor would be back shortly . . . and later, because Joe didn't have anyplace better to go. Anyway, the scatterbrained youth might still arrive.
Joe carried the Fasti to read on the airplane. Ovid's erudite myths and false etymologies had at least as much bearing on this world as they did on the one from which the People Mover had spirited Joe away.
After an hour or so, Joe snagged the first servant to pass in the hallway and asked for an armchair. What he got was solid, cushionless, and not particularly comfortable—but it arrived within fifteen minutes of Joe's request. The men carrying the chair panted as if they'd run all the way from the basement with it.
The frog story seemed to have gotten around.
But nobody else came to Joe's room until a servant summoned him to dinner in